Certain French entrepreneurs have continued to attract venture capital funds despite the slowdown in investments that began in the summer of 2022. They are distinguished neither by their gender, nor by their age, nor by their diploma, but by their history. They founded their first start-up at a time when the ecosystem was not yet structured, when the very concept of venture capital was not yet as widespread on this side of the Atlantic as it was. is now.
“My first experience not only gave me points of reference but it taught me a certain frugality”recognizes Alex Lebrun, co-founder of several start-ups since 2002. That year, he launched his first company, VirtuOz, an intelligent virtual agent, in the middle of the “winter” of investment, after the first Internet bubble and the crash that she trained. “There was very little seed money [la première levée de fonds] at the time. It took us three years to raise 800,000 euros. We were looking for investors at the same time as the first clients, and we were providing services in parallel to keep up”he remembers.
Rachel Delacour, for her part, raised 5 million euros in two installments for her first data analysis software company, Bime, created in 2009 in Montpellier. “It was just after the subprime crisis, that didn’t help. But when you create your first box with pieces of string, it requires you to be creative! » This creativity and the sale of Bime to Zendesk for $45 million (or 42 million euros) six years after its creation certainly helped the entrepreneur for her second company, Sweep, specializing in decarbonization.
A change of scale
In just over a year, between the end of 2021 and the end of 2022, M’s start-upme Delacour raised three funds from French and foreign investors for a total amount of $100 million. « Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce [un éditeur de logiciels], was surprised at the amounts raised by Sweep. He told me that he had only raised $60 million in total between the creation of his company in 1999 and its IPO in 2004.” Proof that there has been a change of scale over the last twenty years. Today, after seeding, funding rounds amount to tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars.
After he sold VirtuOz to the American Nuance in 2012, Alex Lebrun created another start-up, Wit.ai, specializing in voice recognition applications, which he sold to Facebook before creating Nabla in 2019 For this company which develops an intelligent assistant for doctors, he completed a fundraising of 17 million euros in January 2020.
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