French startup Jumpa contemporary take on the umbrella company concept in France, raised €11 million (about $12 million at current exchange rates) in a Series A funding round.

Jump offers full-time contracts to freelancers in search of the soundness and benefits of full-time work. It acts as an administrative companion only, and employees remain independent—they’ll work with multiple clients and negotiate their contracts directly.

Breega is leading today’s funding round, with Index Ventures and Raise Ventures also participating. The startup previously raised €4 million (around $4.5 million) in 2021.

Once signed up, freelancers can invoice their clients through Jump’s platform, and at the tip of the month, they’ll create pay slips and get paid. This feature alone implies that freelancers can set a pay schedule for themselves that may work all yr long—even during those slow summer months.

And with a everlasting contract, employees are registered with the national health system and may contribute to the national pension scheme. Jump also offers medical insurance contracts through Alana, food vouchers through Swile, access to worker savings schemes and more. In France, a everlasting contract can be particularly helpful when you are attempting to buy a house and are negotiating a mortgage with a bank.

There are some trade-offs, though. Corporate dues are deducted out of your salary, and Jump itself costs €99 per thirty days. But whenever you’re a freelancer, money is simply a part of the equation. I see numerous freelancers who want the very best of each freelancing and full-time work. So far, the startup has managed to persuade 2,000 freelancers to jump.

The startup also recently launched a free offer for freelancers just starting out. It features a free, skilled checking account with a virtual debit card that works with Apple Pay or Google Pay. There are also a couple of software features that may help you invoice your first clients, akin to a built-in invoicing tool and a dashboard for tracking financial performance.

“This more or less corresponds to the way freelancers work: they often start with the basic French freelance status, and then move to another status when they start to feel the limitations of their status and have enough income,” said Nicolas Fayon, co-founder and CEO of Jump (pictured above).

Jump wants to support more independent employees in the long run, so it currently offers services to software developers, data engineers, project managers, creative consultants, and sports coaches.

For example, it wants to support B2C merchants, akin to “businesses that bill customers through Stripe, using online payments or physical payment terminals,” Fayon said. Jump also plans to expand to other countries, starting with a U.K. umbrella company for freelancers working within the U.K.

AND latest Financial Times profile Mayayoshi Son opens with the SoftBank CEO seemingly hitting all-time low, gazing his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “I haven’t done anything to be proud of.”

Indeed, Son largely disappeared from the general public eye after SoftBank’s Vision Fund suffered huge losses on investments like WeWork. But FT journalist Lionel Barber, whose latest biography of Son is titled “Gambling Man,” writes that while Son gave the impression to be “doing penance,” he was in actual fact “plotting a comeback.”

Now SoftBank is specializing in artificial intelligence and has achieved success by taking integrated circuit design company Arm public.

The profile also includes some amusing personal details, resembling Son’s apparent fascination with Napoleon. When the activist investor mentioned Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in a 2020 meeting with Son, he reportedly dismissed them as “one-business men.”

“The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son said. “I’m not a CEO. I’m building an empire.”

CEO of Automattic and Co-Founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg this week unleashed a devastating attack on a rival company, calling it WP engine “WordPress cancer.”

Mullenweg criticized the corporate — which has been commercializing the WordPress open source project since 2010 — for making profits without giving much in return, in addition to disabling key features that make WordPress such a robust platform in the primary place.

For context, WordPress has the facility over 40% network, and while any person or company is free to use the open-source project and run an internet site themselves, various firms have sprung up that sell hosting services and technical expertise based on it. These include Automattic, which Mullenweg founded in 2005 to monetize a project he created two years earlier; and WP Engine, a managed WordPress hosting provider that has raised nearly $300 million in funding over its 14 years of operation, the vast majority of which got here from a $250 million investment from private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.

This week I shall be speaking at WordCamp USA 2024WordPress-focused conference held in Portland, Oregon, Mullenweg didn’t mince his words in his criticism of WP Engine. Taking the stage, Mullenweg read get out of the post has just published on his personal blog, where he points out a separate “five for the long run“investment commitments made by Automattic and WP EngineWith former co-creator 3900 hours per week and the last one spending just 40 hours.

While he admitted that these numbers are only “approximate” and will not be entirely accurate, Mullenweg said the disparity in contributions is critical, as each Automattic and WP Engine “are about the same size, with revenues of around half a billion (dollars).”

Mullenweg has criticized a minimum of one other outstanding hosting provider up to now, accusing GoDaddy of making the most of an open-source project without giving anything meaningful in return — or more precisely, he called GoDaddy is “parasitic company“and “an existential threat to the future of WordPress.”

In his latest offensive, Mullenweg didn’t stop at WP Engine, but prolonged his criticism to the corporate’s major investor.

“The company (WP Engine) is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm $102 billion in assets under management,” Mullenweg said. “Silver Lake doesn’t care about your open source ideals, they just want a return on their capital. So at this point, I’m asking everyone in the WordPress community to vote with their wallets. Who are you giving your money to — someone who will feed the ecosystem, or someone who will extract every bit of value from it until it withers?”

In response to query asked by audience member Later, when asked to make clear whether Mullenweg was urging WordPress users to boycott WP Engine, he said that he hopes every WP Engine customer watches his presentation and that when it comes time to renew their contract, they need to consider their next steps.

“There are other hosts who’re really hungry — Hostinger, Bluehost Cloud, Pressableetc., that will love to have that business,” Mullenweg said. “You can get faster performance even by going to someone else, and migrating has never been easier. That’s part of the idea of ​​liberating data. It’s like a day’s work to change your site to something else, and I highly encourage you to think about that when it comes time to renew your contract if you’re a current WP Engine customer.”

“WordPress Cancer”

In response to the uproar over the speech, Mullenweg published continuation of the blog postwhere he calls WP Engine a “cancer” on WordPress. “It’s important to remember that if left untreated, the cancer will spread,” he wrote. “WP Engine sets a bad standard that others may find appropriate to replicate.”

Mullenweg said WP Engine is making the most of the confusion that exists between the WordPress project and the business services company WP Engine.

“It needs to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress,” Mullenweg wrote. “My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they are giving you WordPress, but they are not. And they are profiting off of that confusion.”

Mullenweg also said that WP Engine is actively selling an inferior product since the core WordPress project stores every change made to allow users to revert their content to a previous version — something that WP Engine doesn’t allow, according to his support page.

While customers can request to enable revisions, support only covers three revisions, that are routinely deleted after 60 days. WP Engine recommends customers use an “external editing system” in the event that they need extensive revision management. The reason for this, according to Mullenweg, is straightforward: saving money.

“They turn off commits because it costs them more money to keep a history of changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that money protecting your content,” Mullenweg says. “That goes to the heart of what WordPress does, and it destroys it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to recover your content, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is to manage and protect your content.”

TechCrunch has reached out to WP Engine for comment. We’ll update here after we hear back.