🤑 Sorare + Mirakl = French Tech's $1.2B Day 🤑

The French Tech Journal provides analysis of France’s digital ecosystem as well as in-depth interviews with French entrepreneurs and VCs. If you like what you read, please forward the newsletter to friends or share it with your social networks.

If you’d like to support independent and original reporting on the French Tech ecosystem, please consider a paid subscription. Send tips, comments, questions, and your ideas to our global headquarters: chris@frenchtechjournal.com.

The quiet summer stretch for French Tech funding ended with a resounding bang on Tuesday. First, Sorare announced in the morning that it had raised a record $680 million round of financing. Just a few hours later, marketplace platform Mirakl closed a $555 million round. The companies are now valued respectively at $4.3 billion and $3.2 billion.

I'm willing to bet it's the single largest funding day in French Tech history.

The Sorare funding is particularly mind-blowing, and not just because of its size. This was a Series B round – Series B!– which is a reminder that Sorare is an incredibly young startup that was only founded in 2018. If there has been a French startup that has had a more meteoric rise, I can't think of it.

I spoke to Sorare co-founder and CEO Nicolas Julia earlier this year for a profile on France's NFT industry for Sifted.eu. The company has built a fantasy football platforn based on non-fungible tokens (NFT) and had just burst into the international spotlight following a €40 million round of venture capital that was led by Benchmark and Accel, two international biggies.