25 Years of Ventech: The Past, the Now, and the Future!

A Few Words from Ventech’s 25th Anniversary Celebration

25 years… That’s almost as long as my marriage.

We’ve been together through so many exciting, positive times, but also through a couple of impressive moments of crisis. I’m talking about Ventech by the way. 😊

The good times have always been thanks to all of you. It begins with our investors, our LPs, whose trust enabled us to raise 14 funds across various strategies, exceeding €1 billion, and to execute our pioneering strategy.

Thanks to you, and your invaluable trust along the way, we were one of the early movers in European tech 25 years ago, and later on the very first European VC to establish a presence in China when the first opportunities emerged, and again later the first Paris-born VC to build a distributed European partnership with local presence in Munich, Berlin, Helsinki and since 2023, in Stockholm.

Pioneering also have been our entrepreneurs.

Yes, we do consider you people as our entrepreneurs, the ones we want to back and follow in glorious times as well as in rough weather. Among the 320+ companies we’ve backed, there are countless inspiring stories. And I apologize in advance as I can only cite a few of them.

I remember the early heroics of Musiwave, one of the rare French tech companies to achieve an acquisition exceeding €100 million — an impressive milestone 20 years ago.

I remember Meilleurtaux.com, which couldn’t help to be the first at what they do every time: 1st company ever to list on Euronext Growth (then Alternext), first company ever to transition to the main Euronext compartment, and then first again to delist following this path through a great acquisition, and still thriving independently today.

I remember Webedia that we backed when they had the mock-up of their first website, Purepeople, and which became the first ever Ventech-backed company to reach 1 B€ in revenue. Huge congrats to them.

I remember Withings, which invented real and successful connected objects when the term was just a gimmick for useless gadgets.

I remember Arteris, first time ever we invested twice in the same company! One investment resulted in a major trade sale, the other in a successful NASDAQ IPO. That’s literally 2 birds with one stone.

I remember Believe of course, that we had the privilege to partner with from a tiny digital publishing company all the way to becoming the 4th largest music company in the world. Not for long: Denis, the podium is expecting you sooner rather than later.

And so many others, Ekinops and Ateme who IPOed when nobody thought it would be possible; StickyAds and TCG, the unrivaled masters of capital efficiency; and of course so many outstanding companies still in portfolio, like category-creators Veo from Denmark, Prewave from Austria, Crossbeam (Reveal) initially from France, or Ogury.

Again I’m deeply sorry that I could not cite everyone since there are simly so many! I’m feeling like Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, arguably in a much more comfortable way.

Those are the good memories, the good times.

The challenging times, they didn’t come from you, nor from us by the way. They came from the macro environment, the god damned cycle.

We are in a line of business where we must live with the cycle, prepare for it and ride it when it occurs. But we were born right before the mother of all crises for a tech investor: the infamous 2000 internet bubble. We lived through this, Alain and I together, Claire, Christian, Tero also, as co-investors of ours. And we all felt being thrown in the water like a baby, not in a pool, but in the middle of an ocean.

“Hey, here you are. Let’s see if you can make it home now. You’d better learn to swim fast.”

And we made it home. Thanks to Meilleurtaux.com, thanks to Musiwave, and a few others, and thanks to our loyal and supportive investors, we made it home. And honestly, after going through this, in the following 20 years we felt like you could throw anything at us, we’ll be ready, we’ll be prepared.

And boy that was a good thing to have been prepared for 2022/2023.

So where do we go now?

As you can see, new corporate identity!

I hope you like the purple. You’re going to see a lot.

New funds, Ventech Capital VI which is being deployed, new Opportunity fund(s) closing, next launch should be AFI Ventures II most likely, the second generation of our impact Seed fund managed by our great AFI team.

New faces in the team; new office in Stockholm (OK, it’s already one year old…). And the very same strategy: we want to be the best early-stage specialist. Our craft is and remains to be identifyng the best entrepreneurs and teams, and do our absolute best to back them, support them, fight alongside them to ignite tomorrow’s tech revolutions.

It’s an incredibly difficult assignment, but it’s also the best one.

There’s nothing more exciting than creation.

I saw your faces when Ms Feng was performing. There was fascination in your eyes. Out of nowhere suddenly something that just didn’t exist before appears. Entrepreneurs are somehow artists in their own way, just like Ms Feng. Some of them are a bit balder arguably.

We believe it is both a great time and an important time to double down on tech and early-stage in Europe.

First, it’s a great time to invest in early-stage. The moment in the cycle is probably very good. You know the saying: take the stairs up, and the elevator down. We are most probably in the early flights of stairs up and historically it translated into great value creation for early-stage ventures and great vintages for VC funds. But let’s forget about the cycle for a moment as it’s not the most important.

The most important factor is talent and ambition. And the sheer volume of available talent in Europe for entrepreneurship has been growing impressively and consistently for the past 20 years and now makes it a compelling force to reckon with in the global competition.

Last week we had a prep call for a fireside talk with my good friend Eric Carreel. Eric has been an entrepreneur for close to 30 years, creating many companies including well-known hits Inventel and Withings.

In the conversation he was illustrating how much progress has been witnessed from his personal experience, saying: “25 years ago, when people at dinners asked what I did for a living, and I replied, ‘I’m an entrepreneur,’ I could almost feel their pity as if I couldn’t land a proper job. Today, at the very same diners, entrepreneurship is all that counts.”

For all the excess of today’s bias towards entrepreneurship, it’s perfectly illustrating what we see on the field: a huge majority of the most talented, energetic, volunteer minds in Europe are now frantically attracted towards entrepreneurship, start-ups and small businesses in general. And that changes everything. Again, probably a bit in excess today, but abundance is good. Period.

So a great time to double down.

I told you it’s a great time but it’s also a very important one indeed, and I will conclude with this.

In our ecosystem, with the entrepreneurs, the investors, the VCs, we always took pride in serving several purposes in a win-win association. In no particular order:

- make possible the creation and development of new companies, creating jobs and wealth for the community;

- deliver superior financial returns to investors so that the cycle is virtuous and money keeps flowing in the system and accelerating;

- create new products and services that will enhance the life of consumers or improve the way businesses work.

It’s a fantastic alignment, and a reason in itself to continue working harder and harder.

But we recently added another key motivation. Friendly globalization is suffering, to say the least. Europe is more and more on its own. That is an opportunity or a threat, depending on how we collectively play it. I’m not talking about military might — though technology undeniably plays a huge role — our focus is on economic strength: ensuring Europe retains a seat at the global table.

Out of the 10 largest companies worldwide, 8 are tech companies. The other 2 are Saudi Aramco, basically the wealth of a whole country, and Berkshire Hathaway, a financial conglomerate whose largest position remains Apple. The others are the so-called Magnificent Seven (Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla), all American, and #10 is? Can you guess? TSMC from Taiwan. Tech is eating everything.

There is no other choice for us Europeans than to embrace the global tech competition.

And, since talent is everything, we already have so many assets to build upon.

The message is simple: if we want to keep our specific way of life, our values as Europeans and thrive in this century: entrepreneurs, please keep on hustling and pushing as hard as you can; institutions and investors, let’s double down on the means we provide entrepreneurs with to allow them to build the best products and services.

Last but not least. I started this little speech comparing the existence of Ventech with my 25 years, and counting, of being married. So what can we say about 24 and a half years of being business partners? With him, we can probably finish each other’s sentences, and we disagree no more than once a year max. Kudos to the one who created Ventech and who invited each and every one of us to this great adventure: a huge huge thank you from all of us Mr. Alain Caffi!

This is it. Thank you all again for your friendship, for your support all through those 25 years, for being here tonight with us and for the next 25 years.

Thank you.

Jean Bourcereau