The first fund’s ultimate close has been announced by Emblem, a relatively new European venture capital firm with its headquarters in Paris. The Emblem team secured a total of €80 million, or approximately $85 million at current exchange rates, eighteen months after the initial closure.
In the current financing climate, this is no small accomplishment. For the third consecutive year, venture funding declined in 2024, according to Atomico’s most recent State of European Tech report. The lack of acquisitions and initial public offerings at the moment is one of the primary causes of this.
Consequently, venture capital as an investment sector has lost some of its appeal. Despite the current surge in artificial intelligence, which may create a massive investment opportunity, a number of venture capital firms are having difficulty raising follow-on financing.
However, that didn’t stop Emblem from raising the maximum amount it had initially planned to, known as its hard cap. Before founding Embl, Bénédicte de Raphélis Soissan and Guillaume Durao had made some intriguing company angel investments.They made investments in cultured meat company Gourmey, pet insurance startup Dalma, and cryptocurrency trading card game Sorare, to mention a few.Oh no.
With Emblem, a seed investment firm that hopes to make 25 to 30 investments with its maiden fund, they wanted to take things a step further by working with a legitimate venture capital firm. Leading or co-leading seed rounds with tickets priced between €500,000 and €3 million is what they would prefer. However, if there is a strong opportunity, the company is also open to following another lead investor.
Since its initial closing in March 2023, Emblem has already made investments in 16 businesses. Some of these have been covered by TechCrunch. Among the examples are:
Pivot is a rival of Coupa and a procurement tool.
Voodoo and other consumer app studios provide as inspiration for The Mobile-First Company, a B2B mobile app company.
Altrove is a new materials firm that accelerates research through lab automation and artificial intelligence.
Similar to Shopify, Volta is an online marketplace that specializes only in business-to-business transactions.
Both geographically and in terms of area of focus, the portfolio is varied. “We’ve invested sixteen times. Eight of them are in France, six are in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden), and we also created one in the United States and one in Italy, de Raphélis Soissan told TechCrunch.
France and the Nordic IT sector continue to be Emblem’s primary priorities. Family offices and software entrepreneurs, including the founders of Unity, Pleo, Qonto, 3shape, Spendesk, Voodoo, Pennylane, JobandTalent, Ledger, and Zendesk, are among the more than 200 limited partners who contributed to the initial fund. They account for more than half of the total.
The remainder was financed through a number of funds of funds and pledges from the French sovereign fund Bpifrance and the Danish sovereign fund EIFO. The next fund that Emblem plans to create will likely be about the same size as this one.
We now have some time until we have to raise. We will thus relish it. However, you should never be off-market, according to de Raphélis Soissan. Given that deployment takes four years and we are already halfway through, we will have to begin the process anew in a year.