Participated · Series A · Jan 2025

Passbolt provides an API-centric platform that collaboratively manages and protects accounts, credentials, and secrets used by people and machines across devices. It supports passwords and a wide range of organizational credentials, including root accounts, SSH keys, API keys, non-human credentials, key-value secrets, web logins, and TOTPs for MFA. The product is open source with self-hosting capabilities and flexible customization to meet company policies and regulatory needs. Passbolt offers a free community edition (Passbolt CE), a commercial enterprise edition (Passbolt Pro) with support, and a SaaS offering (Passbolt Cloud). Led by CEO Kevin Muller and based in Luxembourg, the company targets organizations of all sizes. Passbolt provides an open-source, privacy-focused password manager aimed at teams, offering a free community edition (Passbolt CE) and two commercial products: Passbolt Pro (self-hosted) and Passbolt Cloud (hosted for smaller teams). The product targets collaborative access management for developers and marketers who share credentials and require differentiated access levels. The company says it has close to 100,000 users and doubled headcount from 6 to 12 in 2020. Passbolt emphasizes transparency and open-source security versus competitors that use “security by obscurity.” With the new funding, the startup plans to expand technical teams and hire multi-skilled developers familiar with open-source. The team expects community-driven demand to accelerate roadmap development in the short term. Passbolt is an open-source password manager built on PGP/GnuPG that validates users and verifies secrets server-side to enable secure data sharing among team members. The platform is customizable via its API and was incubated at Technoport. Founded in 2017 by Cedric Alfonsi, Kevin Muller and Remy Bertot, Passbolt serves about 30,000 users. The company plans to upgrade its software, expand its team and launch Passbolt Cloud, a SaaS offering for users with limited infrastructure. Management has set a user-growth target of at least 100,000 users in 2019. Recent fundraising will support these product and growth plans.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2022

Shippr operates a logistics platform that connects businesses across sectors with transport companies, offering same-day delivery options from cargo bikes to refrigerated trucks. Its product includes real-time tracking, route optimization, enhanced communication modules and an app for transport professionals with guiding services and automatic invoicing. The company emphasizes sustainable urban logistics and fair working conditions, and has committed to B Corp certification by 2024 and carbon-neutral operations by 2025. Shippr has established fast-growing operations in Belgium and France, each generating millions of euros in ARR. The team is pursuing broader European expansion, targeting cities such as London and executing a hiring strategy to support scale.

Participated · Equity · Jun 2021

Renes, Switzerland-based ClearSpace develops systems to remove orbital debris and extend satellite life. The company is preparing for ClearSpace-1, billed as the world’s first space debris removal mission, scheduled to launch in 2026. ClearSpace won a €110 million contract from the European Space Agency for the ClearSpace-1 mission in 2020 and has support from Omega. It recently announced a satellite life-extension collaboration with satcom operator Intelsat that builds on its debris-removal technology. Founders Luc Piguet and Muriel Richard-Noca said the company began four years ago and that the market is developing faster than expected. ClearSpace is establishing an operational presence in Luxembourg as part of its expansion plans. ClearSpace develops a robot 'chaser' to remove orbital debris and is building technologies for sensor fusion, autonomous navigation and space robotics. The team integrates those technologies into an agile chaser aimed at capturing debris orbiting at 7 kilometers per second at more than 600 kilometers altitude. Its principal mission, ClearSpace-1, is scheduled for 2025. The company says the new capital will be used to develop the robot cleaner and to support its international activities. ClearSpace has backing from the European Space Agency, which has invested €86 million into the ClearSpace-1 mission. CEO and co-founder Luc Piguet emphasized investor support as critical to accelerating the company’s efforts to build space sustainability. ClearSpace is an EPFL Space Center spin‑off developing agile satellites that can find, capture and remove non‑responsive and non‑functioning satellites from orbit. Its systems can navigate and catch objects semi‑autonomously using sensors and algorithms, and the company is working on a demonstrator called CleanSpace One to validate the necessary technologies. ClearSpace aims to address an estimated ~3,000 deficient satellites currently in orbit and projects that with roughly 800 small satellites expected to launch in 2022, about 100–200 defunct satellites will require deorbiting each year. To advance development, the startup secured a CHF 100,000 Tech Seed loan from the Foundation for Technological Innovation (FIT), funds the company says will enable it to negotiate its first substantial fundraising. The company is based in Ecublens (VD), spun out of EPFL, and receives support from ESA BIC Switzerland, Innosuisse, EPFL and the European Space Agency. Founders Luc Piguet (CEO), Muriel Richard (Tech Lead) and Catherine Johnson (Design) lead a team of 11 employees.

Led · Equity · Jul 2020

EMAsphere offers a B2B SaaS platform that collects a company’s financial data and customer information in one place. Its software is sold directly and indirectly through partners such as PwC and BDO, with indirect sales accounting for 30% of the business. The company reports monthly recurring revenue has increased by 90% in the past year and serves over 8,000 customers, mainly in the Benelux as well as in France and the United Kingdom. EMAsphere was founded in 2015 and has 55 employees split across a Walloon headquarters, a Ghent office, and a small office in France. With the new funding the company plans to expand abroad—focusing first on France—and to make the product more integration-friendly for CRMs and ERPs. EMAsphere offers a financial insight platform that connects to management solutions, ERP, HR, CRM and even Excel sheets to aggregate data. The platform delivers online dashboards updated daily to show progress toward customer-defined KPIs and includes analytics and prediction capabilities to simplify cash-flow budget planning. The company says its tools make cash-flow budgeting easier and more accurate through forecasting features. EMAsphere was founded in 2015 and maintains offices in Louvain-la-Neuve and Ghent in Belgium and in Paris. It employs 40 people and serves more than 1,600 business clients. The company has secured €4.5 million in funding from private investors and its own employees and plans to scale operations in Belgium and France.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2019

Perlego operates a subscription-based digital library providing access to over one million academic, professional and non-fiction titles. The company has signed partnerships with thousands of publisher brands globally to populate its library. It is used by students worldwide and sells access via a recurring subscription model. Perlego was founded in 2017 by CEO Gauthier Van Malderen and is based in London, UK. The company plans to use new funding to expand internationally and to develop AI-driven products, including Dialogo, an AI-powered research assistant. Its most recent round brought total funding to date to $75M. Perlego operates a textbook-subscription platform that gives paying users unlimited access to textbooks, fiction and other course materials. It currently has 400,000 paying subscribers and a catalogue of about 850,000 titles, which the company says makes it the largest online textbook subscription service. Perlego works with roughly 5,000 education publishers, including Cengage, Routledge, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Harvard University Press, and is linked with 6,000 institutions across 172 countries; about 40% of its students are in the U.S. The company saw rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic (450% subscriber growth in 2021) and says its catalogue rose 166% in the last year and by more than 500,000 titles since 2019. Consumer pricing is £12/month in the U.K. ($18 in the U.S.) with an annual plan that averages £8/month ($12/month) and a two-week free trial; publishers receive roughly 65% of subscription revenues plus additional consumption-based commissions. Product plans include building an ecosystem for course material (annotations, shared libraries, instructor tools), exploring premium tiers and potentially selling physical copies, while the company rejects ad-supported models. Perlego is a London-based textbook subscription service that gives students and professionals access to a large digital library across web, iOS and Android. It houses over 300,000 eBooks from more than 2,300 publishers, including Pearson, Wiley and Sage, and offers content in multiple languages with publishers from Germany, the Nordics and Italy. Professionals comprise about 30% of users, and Perlego reports a 116% month-on-month increase in new subscribers, though it does not disclose total subscriber numbers. In the U.K. the service is priced at £12 per month for access to the full digital library and is positioned as a "Spotify for textbooks" to address high textbook costs and piracy. Perlego says the new funding will be used to build the next-generation "smarter learning platform," add features that simplify and enhance learning, and expand content libraries in non-English languages. The company intends to use these additions to support expansion into strategic European markets beyond its U.K. roots. Perlego provides students and professionals unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of academic and professional eBook titles for £12 a month. The service works with around 650 publishers, including Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, Macmillan Higher Education, and Cengage Learning. Publishers receive 65% of each subscription on a consumption basis, and Perlego supplies publishers with detailed data on title consumption. The company says its model helps monetise content for price-sensitive students, reduce piracy, and avoid cannibalisation of second-hand print sales. Founded by Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis, Perlego has joined the Founders Factory edtech accelerator backed by Holtzbrinck Macmillan. It plans to use new funding to grow the team, expand across the U.K. and Europe, and further develop its product for students and professionals. Perlego is a London-based e-book platform that offers academic and professional e-books through a monthly subscription. The company has partnered with over 240 publishers and offers more than 85,000 e-books to date. Founded by Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis, Perlego focuses on making academic and professional content available via subscription. The company intends to use newly raised funds to grow the team, expand publishing partnerships, and continue developing the platform. Financially, Perlego secured £500K in seed funding from private angels in the UK, Belgium and France, including investor Simon Franks.