Paris-based Alven VC, an early-stage venture capital firm that backs European category-defining startups with global reach, has closed a €350 million fund. Exceeding the initial target of €300 million, this round makes it one of the largest early-stage funds operating out of France.
Alven VI fund
Alven VI secured commitments from a wide range of high-quality European, North American, and other global institutions, and all investors in the prior fund are reinvesting.
Recently, the Paris-headquartered VC firm opened a London office. Also, it is hinted to hire more staff in both offices across investment and portfolio support teams. A portion of the fund will be deployed across Europe, as well as in European founders in the US in sectors where the firm has built deep expertise.
“We pride ourselves in building long-term relationships with entrepreneurs, and this also applies to investors in Alven. Not only our existing LPs have continually invested in us, but we’ve also welcomed a number of new investors that want to be part of the French Tech success story,” said Guillaume Aubin and Charles Letourneur, co-founders of Alven.
European tech ecosystem
Founded in 2000 by Guillaume Aubin and Charles Letourneur, Alven is known for its unicorn investments in companies, including Qonto, Dataiku, Algolia, Stripe and Ankorstore. It has €2 billion in assets under management. Since its debut, the company has backed nearly 160 European teams across Europe and the US.
The company has extensive experience backing and supporting exceptional founders at the early stages. It writes first cheques of a few €100k to €15M with substantial reserves for follow-on investments. It has also realised more than 70 exits, including the more recent sale of Sqreen to Datadog, Cardiologs to Philips and Frichti to Gorillas.
Over the last few months, Alven has added portfolio companies in France and regions such as the USA, UK, Finland, Sweden, Poland and Switzerland to name a few.
First-of-its-kind talent program
Alven recently launched Operation3, the first talent program dedicated to identifying and training tomorrow’s best web3 operators as well as a number of initiatives to foster and nurture a pool of female executives to promote diversity within the portfolio executive committees.
Given the highly competitive nature of the European talent market, this deeply-rooted positioning has been a key success factor for us and has made Alven a very attractive platform for founders and US VCs to partner with, as evidenced by the high number of co-lead investments with top tier US funds.
With its multi-sector specialist approach that focuses on every investor bringing specific domain expertise and relationships to the table, Alven will continue to build on its successes in fintech, marketplaces, enterprise software, social & entertainment.
Furthermore, it will emphasis on new growth areas in crypto and other areas in developer, data tooling and climate tech. The recent investments include Mindee, MyTraffic, Carbonfact, Kaikoo, and Stoik.
