French investor Eurazeo has closed €650m of a new billion-euro growth fund, two years after four managing directors left the firm at once, delaying fundraising efforts by over a year.
The firm expects to reach a final close of at least €1bn in the next year.
Eurazeo, one of the few European VCs to be publicly traded, invests across all stages in private equity (PE) and VC. In 2023 the managing director for growth Yann du Rusquec left the firm, followed by colleagues Nathalie Kornhoff-Brüls, Zoé Fabian and Guillaume d’Audiffret. The four have launched their own growth fund Noteus Partners.
Following the departures Eurazeo postponed the fundraising of its fourth growth fund. The fund’s new managing director Hala Fadel told Sifted at the time this would enable LPs to see “stability in the team”.
Fadel tells Sifted fundraising started in September 2024, over a year after the departures, with a team including fresh recruits like partner Raluca Ragab, previously at Goldman Sachs, and operating partner Philippe Vimard, the former CTO of Doctolib and Klarna.
Eurazeo’s growth investment team is now 17-strong and also includes 5 operating partners, across France, the UK, Germany and Spain.
“The strategy, the team, the investments are very different to what came before,” Fadel tells Sifted. “Many investors were curious about this new team.”
Fadel says the majority of LPs who backed Eurazeo’s previous growth fund invested in the new fund, and there are also new investors. Eurazeo’s previous fund reached €1.6bn in 2021, which included €500m raised from private individuals by the firm’s wealth team.
LPs are both public and private and include the European Investment Fund (EIF) as part of the European Tech Champions Initiative (ETCI) — a fund-of-fund programme intended to back growth VCs in Europe capable of raising funds of €1bn or more. The ETCI has also funded French investors AVP and Keensight, as well as the UK’s Atomico and Italy’s FSI.
Backing European AI champions
The new fund will back scaleups across Europe with tickets ranging from €20-100m, with a focus on AI applications for enterprises in various fields ranging from cybersecurity to climate.
Fadel says a fund dedicated to AI “doesn’t really mean anything anymore, because AI is everywhere.”
“There is no tech company today that doesn’t use AI. […] So, we can only invest in companies that use that tool.”
Fadel says the bar for investing has historically been at least €10m in revenues — but this is changing because of the quick pace of change in AI.
“In SaaS before, at €10m in revenues the technology was pretty derisked,” she says. “In AI, some companies report huge revenues but they are still very risky.”
“We’re not here to take risks on a product or on a market, but on the execution for the company’s future growth. […] We’ll be looking for companies with a competitive advantage, capable of scaling in a very large market, with a team that is high-quality and committed.”
Six companies have received backing from the fund so far, including French climate tech unicorn Ecovadis and digital analytics unicorn ContentSquare, as well as German scaleup Cognigy, which builds AI agents for customer support.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/eurazeo-650m-first-close-growth-fund/
