By Maxime Lhoustau with the help of Saish Rane, Anne-Sophie Carrese, Sébastien Lefebvre, Julien Macquet & Clément Vanden Driessche Introduction Xavier, before being an investor, started as a mathematician and through his vision and ambition to back technological entrepreneurs, our passion for investing in deep tech was born. Anne-Sophie, meanwhile, started…

At Elaia, we have been backing ambitious tech B2B founders for 20 years and one thing that cannot be understated is that sales are important. Most startups start with a vision of the world they want to build, an impact they want to have, a technology, a team, and a…

by Xavier Lazarus Introduction These chapters around “the finance behind startup investing” aim at sharing learnings based on 20 years of experience gathered working at Elaia. In recent years, VC has gained quite the reputation with many SaaS startups reaching the stratosphere and becoming household names. Nevertheless, it is a domain…

By Armelle de Tinguy, Saish Rane with help from Marc Rougier At first look, France doesn’t seem like the birthplace of entrepreneurship despite having invented the word. France is all about lifestyle, culture, excellent food & Vine, and long lasting holidays … the French way of living does not seem…

(and we’re not even talking about the weather) — By Agathe Destruhaut with the help of Christophe Primault, Sébastien Lefebvre, Xavier Lazarus, Julien Macquet, Marc Rougier and Saish Rane. 1. Why we chose to invest in Spain From entering a nascent market… (pre-2010) Elaia’s strong interest in Spain is not accidental. Shortly after launching Elaia, Xavier Lazarus, who is half-Catalan, noticed a growing opportunity in this emerging tech ecosystem.

By Xavier Lazarus with help from Marc Rougier, Saish Rane, Delphine Villuendas & Louisa Mesnard There is a stark difference in the VC world between the end of 2021, the beginning of 2022 and now; going from 5 unicorn announcements in January to a funding winter in the span of…

By Gabriel Franz, with the help of Samantha Jérusalmy, Sacha Loiseau, Marc Rougier, Saish Rane, Louisa Mesnard and Jean-David Zeitoun In July 2021, DeepMind (acquired by Google in 2014) released AlphaFold, a groundbreaking AI system to predict the 3D structure of a protein based only on its basic formula. Trained…

Crisis-time update from a European VC with 13 investments in Cyber By Gabriel Lévy with the help of Marc Rougier, Louisa Mesnard & Saish Rane Is Cyber truly crisis-proof? The current macroeconomic crisis has hit hard: from public markets to private investments, the fall has come hard on some sectors and through a general…

By Benoît Georis with the help of Samantha Jérusalmy, Marc Rougier, Louisa Mesnard & Saish Rane In recent years, France has seen a significant growth (60+ startups every year) in the number of health tech startups (1,700+ so far) incorporated all over its regions. When zooming further, a fraction of…