The billionaire most often associated with French tech has got to be Xavier Niel. The owner of telecoms giant Iliad — the parent company of Free, a major internet provider in France — appears in a lot of hot deals thanks to his investment firm Kima Ventures, which has backed HR-tech Payfit to healthtech unicorn Alan, and more recently buzzy AI startups Mistral and Poolside.
That’s on top of him founding Paris-based startup campus Station F and coding school École 42.
But for the past two years or so, another ultra-wealthy businessman has been making a mark on France’s tech scene. Rodolphe Saadé, the CEO of Marseille-based, family-owned shipping and logistics giant CMA CGM, has been quietly backing some of the country’s most high-profile companies, often alongside Niel.
Saadé participated in Mistral’s and Poolside’s seed rounds, and invested in AI healthtech Nabla, cybersecurity startup Filigran and quantum computing company Pasqal. Together with Niel and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he also committed a total €300m to a non-profit AI research lab in Paris dubbed Kyutai.
Masterminding a large part of his investments is Séverine Grégoire — the head of Zebox Ventures, an early-stage generalist VC fund founded by Saadé last year.
Grégoire is a repeat entrepreneur who successfully exited e-commerce platform Monshowroom and healthtech MesDocteurs between 2006 and 2018. She works directly with Saadé and oversees a team of three other investors.
“Rodolphe Saadé has been interested in the startup ecosystem for a long time,” she tells Sifted.
From CVC to VC
Before 2023, Zebox Ventures was known as CMA CGM Ventures — a corporate venture capital fund that Saadé launched in 2018 and focused on shipping, logistics and media (CMA CGM also owns a number of French media companies).
Grégoire says that the shift towards a more sector-agnostic VC firm happened around the time she joined the company in 2022 — leading to the launch of Zebox Ventures in 2023. The VC is entirely owned by CMA CGM and only deploys money invested by the company.
Company documents dated from last July show that the total capital injected by the shipping giant in Zebox Ventures (and previously in CMA CGM Ventures) since 2018 is nearly €40m — €25m of that was added in the past 18 months. CMA CGM declined to confirm whether this corresponds to the capital made available to the firm to invest or also includes other things like overheads.
“It was Rodolphe [Saadé]’s wish to invest more in the ecosystem, so we adjusted the nature of our investments,” says Grégoire. “The idea really is to monitor trends and discover tomorrow’s champions.”
Zebox Ventures invests up to €300k in pre-seed and seed rounds to back startups globally — although Grégoire says there’s an inevitable bias towards French startups.
The VC firm aims to make more than 50 investments a year, and takes part in follow-on rounds “when it’s worth it,” says Grégoire.
Zebox Ventures isn’t the only tool that CMA CGM has been using to tap into the startup world. In 2018, the company launched Zebox, an accelerator that has hubs in France, the US, the UK, Singapore, Ivory Coast and Guadeloupe, and has supported 300 startups to date. It also has a ‘digital factory’ through which it carries out proof-of-concepts with startups building products that are relevant to CMA CGM.
This week, it also launched international ‘startup awards’, which will reward companies in shipping, logistics and media — with a jury chaired by Saadé. Selected startups will receive up to €150k in financial support as well as commercial partnership opportunities.
“We’re an old industry on the shipping and logistics side of things […] it’s fundamental for any large group to look at innovations, and not miss key technological turning points.”
At any given time, says Grégoire, up to five proof-of-concepts are carried out within the corporation in partnership with startups. CMA CGM was one of the first enterprises to deploy Mistral’s AI model internally, she says; the firm is currently looking at ways to optimise shipping and logistics operations using Pasqal’s quantum computing expertise.
Riding the AI wave
Saadé’s growing visibility in the French tech scene is no doubt linked to his recent investments in some of France’s most high-profile AI startups and commitment to the Kyutai lab in Paris.
“We stick with the trends,” says Grégoire. “Today, there’s a strong focus on AI, so we invest in a few startups around AI.”
The deals closed so far have been competitive — but Zebox Ventures has succeeded in convincing founders.
“It’s important to these companies to have French funds, not only foreign ones,” says Grégoire. “Funds that invest in an ecosystem rather than as a one-shot.”
Saadé, says Grégoire, is keen to participate in the growth of that ecosystem — and to help retain it in Europe.
“We have a lot of entrepreneurial ambition in France today, but even big startups like H or Mistral are funded by US funds,” she says. “We think it’s important to support the effort here in France.
“It’s also why we launched the Kyutai lab — it’s important to retain this talent in France around innovative projects.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/severine-gregoire-rodolphe-saade/
