The Venture Codex

Participated · Series A · Jul 2023

Limonetik is a Paris-based fintech offering a payments platform-as-a-service that centralizes processing, aggregation and development of online, offline and international alternative payment methods. Its PaaS targets multichannel retailers, marketplaces, gig and shared-economy platforms, B2B platforms, acquirers and payment service providers. The platform supports over 265 local payment methods across 60 countries and integrates multiple financial flows into a single settlement while providing reconciliation and reporting via API. Limonetik processes more than $2 billion annually and supports more than 14,000 merchants or marketplaces through payment players. The company has over seven years’ experience in marketplace payment solutions and has been recognized as a “Cool Vendor in digital commerce” by Gartner. It raised €10 million in a Series A from VC firms Newfund, Orkos and Hiinov plus several business angels, supporting its continued growth and international reach.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2016

Linkfluence provides a social data intelligence platform, Radarly, for monitoring, analysis and activation of social media channels. The company captures and analyzes more than 150 million posts a day to help brands make better decisions. It has more than 200 employees across France, Germany, the United Kingdom, China and Singapore and serves over 300 clients, including Danone, Sanofi, Orange and McDonald’s. Linkfluence intends to use the new funds to pursue investment in R&D and innovation and to further accelerate international expansion. The company is led by CEO Hervé Simonin. Linkfluence provides social media intelligence through its Radarly Product Suite, a SaaS platform that collects and analyzes conversations from Facebook, Twitter, online media, blogs, forums and other social networks. The Radarly suite is described as quick and easy to set up, user-friendly, and multilingual. The platform captures around 10 million mentions daily and surfaces actionable insights that can be applied across an organization. Linkfluence positions itself as a leading Social Media Intelligence company serving brands. The company is based in Saint-Denis, France. Recently it completed a $4.5M funding round.

Participated · Equity · May 2012

Sensee is a French online optician that offers glasses, sunglasses and contact lenses. Launched in October 2011 and led by CEO Marc Simoncini, the company has built a customer base of over 200,000 users. Sensee has raised €17.5m in funding. Backers named in the article include Partech International, Orkos Capital, Idinvest and other business angels. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its development.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2011

Scoop.it provides social curation tools that let users build topic pages where they aggregate and share relevant content, which the company has described as "your own digital magazine." Pages are viewable on Scoop.it, shareable on social networks, and SEO-optimized, and other users can follow those topic pages. The company has launched an iPhone app and today introduced an iPad app that can function as a standalone experience without prior web registration. The iPad app surfaces personalized recommendations, supports searching and browsing topics, and makes it easy to save articles to existing or new topic pages with edits reflected on the web. Scoop.it contrasts topic-based following with following people to improve signal-to-noise and can embed Storify stories on its pages. The company recently raised $2.6 million in new funding and says users have indexed and shared more than 50 million pieces of content. Scoop.it provides a tool that lets people gather and distribute content from around the web into magazine-style topic pages using a search algorithm combined with human curation. The company is launching publicly after a year in an invite-only beta and is led by co-founder and CEO Guillaume Decugis. Scoop.it emphasizes its algorithm for finding relevant articles and videos while relying on human editors to create higher-quality, sticky topic pages. It reports more than 2 million visits per month and traffic is growing about 35 percent month-over-month. Scoop.it has received $10 million in funding from Partech International, Orkos, Elaia and IRDI. The company is beginning to experiment with a premium model that will let businesses embed branded topic pages and subscribe to an analytics tool for a monthly fee.

Led · Equity · Apr 2010

MXP4 builds interactive tools and a digital music format that lets users remix tracks, add images and video, and add music layers. Launched in 2007, the company offers widgets for web and iPhone that let fans "play" and interact with music. Over 100 recording artists, including David Guetta, Michael Jackson and Britney Spears, and brands such as Air France Music and Coca-Cola have used MXP4. The startup reports fans use interactive music for an average of 9.1 minutes per track, which drives 75% of traffic virally and creates clicks/purchases as much as 3%. The latest funding will support the MXP4 Everywhere project to distribute the widgets as widely as possible. MXP4 has now raised $13M in total to date. MXP4 builds interactive digital music tools and a digital music format that the company says rivals MP3, enabling users to remix tracks, add images and video content, and layer additional music. Its tools are aimed at artists and producers who want listeners to "play" and interact with digital music. The company launched in 2007 and is Paris-based. MXP4 recently raised $2.7 million in funding from Sofinnova Partners and Ventech Capital. The raise accompanies a leadership change: founder and CEO Gilles Babinet will become chairman and Albin Serviant, formerly EVP and GM of Vivendi Mobile Entertainment, will take over as CEO.