Groupe Casino
1 Cours Antoine Guichard, Saint-Etienne, Loire, 42008, France
Overview
Long-standing player in retail distribution in France since 1898, Casino Group is also one of the world leaders in food retail with over 11,172 stores in the world in France and in Latin America, with a turnover of 34.6 Billion Euros. It has built a portfolio of strong identity brands which evolve alongside their customers and fulfil the expectations of each and every customer. Its vision of the future of retail is clear: it makes the most of technology to revolutionize the purchasing experience without dehumanizing the store, and it relies on its pioneering role in e-commerce to get ahead and take up the new food e-commerce challenge. Finally, its new BtoB service activities, which are currently in full development, offer great opportunities for growth. Long committed to a realistic sustainable development approach, the Group aims at improving its impact on climate and redirecting consumption towards a more responsible and sustainable model. It’s its responsibility as retailer and the pride of its teams.
- Total investments
- 1
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 8
Sector focus
- Food and Beverage
- Food Delivery
- Grocery
- Retail
Investment portfolio
- Qarnot
Participated · Series B · Mar 2020
Qarnot builds modular boiler systems that house servers and route their waste heat into central heating networks, converting up to 95% of computer waste heat into hot water. The modules pack up to 12 Open Compute Project–form-factor servers using AMD Epyc and Intel Xeon CPUs and connect to building water systems for passive cooling and heat delivery. The company began with electric heaters for construction and now rents compute to clients such as BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Illumination while selling heat to social landlords, property developers, local authorities, swimming pools and heating network operators. Qarnot launched 12 years ago and has piloted a 100kW data center in Finland, and is targeting deployments from 500kW up to a few megawatts. Its business model combines selling compute capacity and recovered heat, eliminating separate cooling systems and improving data-center carbon footprint. Financially, Qarnot recently raised €12.5M and secured a €22.5M credit line to finance future projects. Qarnot builds heating hardware that contains computer servers so the waste heat from computation is used to warm buildings. The company sells computing-equipped electrical heaters to construction firms and provides occupants with local controls and a mobile app. Around 1,000 social housing units are currently heated by Qarnot devices. On the compute side, companies such as BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Natixis rent Qarnot’s servers; customers also include Illumination Mac Guff for 3D rendering. To address heating seasonality, Qarnot has developed scalable boiler systems that house CPU or mixed CPU/GPU server racks. The company has formed a joint venture with Groupe Casino to heat warehouses using computer racks. Its business model combines hardware sales to buildings with hosted compute rentals to enterprise clients.