Welcome to French Tech Updates! Your weekly source of startup, VC, and tech news and insights. I’m James, a startup-obsessed American living in Paris.

What’s new this week in 🇫🇷

• 🏪 Newfund is getting into small business acquisitions: The 18-year-old venture capital fund has historically specialized in early-stage companies born in Europe or the US with goals to expand across the Atlantic. This new fund for Newfund marks a departure from that original thesis and will instead support search fund-like acquisitions of “boring” SMEs.
  

• 🚀 Ring Capital has raised €217M their their new impact-focused growth & buyout fund—Altitude II: The new fund for the Paris-based investor will prioritize investments in energy, mobility, healthcare, and education for growth-stage companies with €10M or more in revenue and €1-5M in EBITDA.
  

• 🌁 Hexa opens Hexa House San Francisco: The storied, Parisian startup studio has opened a new location in Silicon Valley linked to their existing Start program. The expansion comes in response to Hexa’s leadership witnessing many existing companies, both from Hexa and elsewhere, moving to the valley from France. That trend, combined with a new wave of AI researchers making the move west, sparked Hexa to embrace the US as well. All new Hexa founders will have the option to work and live in the SF location and interested individuals can apply here.
  

• 🤖 Mistral launches new coding model Devstral 2: Just weeks after releasing the Mistral 3 line of models, Devstral 2 is the Paris-based operation’s response to “vibe coding” models like Cursor and Claude Code. Unlike the Mistral 3 models, which are intentionally light to run on hardware and robotics platforms, Devstral 2 is betting on persistent memory to stand out from competitors—remembering key information about users’ code base to increase reliability.
  

• ♻️ Impact investment fund makesense launches €25M fund III: 100% of the carried interest generated by the fund will be donated (reinvested) to makesense's endowment fund.

🙋‍♂️ Quiz: According to data from PitchBook, what’s the median pre-to-post money valuation step up for early-stage companies in Q4, ‘25?

(answer at the bottom of the newsletter)

• A.) 2.2X

• B.) 3.1X

• C.) 4.2X

• D.) 4.9X

🌍 Headlines from around the world

• 💬 OpenAI hires Slack CEO as new Chief Revenue Officer (Wired)

• 🇦🇺 Australia’s social media ban for under 16-year-olds goes into effect (CNN)

• 🌎 Sam Altman’s World launches its ‘super app,’ including crypto pay and encrypted chat features (TechCrunch)

• 🍿 Paramount Skydance launches hostile bid for Warner Brothers at over $108 billion (CNBC)

• 🏰 Billion-dollar OpenAI deal allows users to make content with Disney characters (NPR)

• 🇳🇱 GoCardless sells to Dutch rival Mollie for €1.05 billion (The Sunday Times)

• 🙊 Elon Musk taunts Europe and tests willingness to enforce online laws (NYT)

• 🚔 Disgraced “crypto king” Do Kwon sentenced to 15 years in prison (CNN)

• 📈 Wealthfront’s public offer debuts at a $2.1 billion valuation (Forbes)

• 🐅 Tiger Global is back, raising a new $2.2 billion fund (CNBC)

• 🕺 Google debuts ‘Disco,’ a Gemini-powered tool for making web apps from browser tabs (TechCrunch)

• 🎤 Jay-Z’s MarcyPen Capital Partners launches $500M fund focused on Asia (Hybebeast)

Building a VC From Day 1 in 2025

When Gaultier Brun walked away from Antler one year ago he thought he was also walking away from venture capital for good. Instead, a cold DM on LinkedIn led him to joining 199 Ventures as the first hire. Brun has spent most of this year building up a fund from day 1 and recently shared what it looks like to launch and operate a VC fund in 2025.

While today 199 Ventures looks like a polished, established early-stage investor, it got its start without any of the hallmarks most people associate with venture capital: no legacy brand, no LP base, and no formalized internal processes. What Brun described was not the glamorous, romanticized version of VC, but rather the scrappy, startup-like early days that connect the dots between 199 Ventures today and day 1.

Starting From 0

199 Ventures is actually the second fund Brun has helped to set up. In 2022, he worked alongside Antoine Poirson to establish Antler’s Paris operations—although that experience was very different. With over 30 offices and a hybrid accelerator/investor model, opening the Antler office was much more like expanding a franchise than starting from scratch.

As he told me, “With Antler, you could rely on this global existing brand, which is much easier than starting from scratch. But since that brand exists, you also need to rely on what it means. You have to fit into it, which helps at first but is constraining later on.”

With 199 Ventures, Brun has fully shed those constraints. Although technically a family office, 199 Ventures operates like a venture capital fund in every aspect except for its LP base, which is funded solely by Andréa Bensaid—founder of the digital marketing agency Eskimoz. When Bensaid decided to professionalize his angel investing, he posted on LinkedIn looking for a partner to run the operation. That post, and Brun’s subsequent cold outreach, led to the two linking up to form the fund—informally at first and then officially.

At that time, 199 Ventures was a place “where everything was yet to be done and where everything was in flux”—a fitting start for a fund whose name, 199, was chosen in part because of its symbolic connection to change and evolution.

Why Building a Fund is Like Running a Startup

Throughout our discussion, I found it interesting to see how the early days at a VC or at a startup are strikingly similar, down to the way that people get involved. There are even strong parallels between Brun’s story and the way that Victoria Dalleau joined Hyperline, first as a Founders Associate and eventually as co-founder.

From the beginning, 199 Ventures also moved at a startup-like pace with Brun taking 30+ meetings per week with entrepreneurs while sourcing potential operating partners and tracking deal flow in a simple Airtable sheet.

This means Brun is wearing more hats than the average person has room for. He is simultaneously an analyst, an investor, a content creator, a public speaker, and whatever else is required for the fund. For some people, that kind of generalist role where everything is your responsibility and the roadmap doesn’t exist could be a nightmare. For Brun, it’s a dream job.

Speed and scrappiness didn’t mean lack of direction though. As a fund with its roots in marketing (more on that in a second), everything about 199 Ventures was imagined, designed, and built to stand out.

Finding Their Edge

In an industry that is famously opaque, 199 Ventures has taken the opposite approach by embracing total transparency. On their website, everything from the size of their investments to the total portfolio value is visible in bold font directly on the homepage. Outside of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s fund Seven Seven Six, it’s incredibly rare to see VCs taking a “build in public” approach.

For Brun, this means a lot of his time goes towards updating the website and 199 Ventures’ socials with the latest portfolio updates, deal information, and fund news.

In Brun’s view, this transparency is the first of several unique points 199 Ventures has to offer over other funds:

“When you start on your own you can make it whatever you want. We chose full transparency and we chose to make 199 Ventures different from what you can find elsewhere.”

In the US there’s a popular saying that “all money is green”…or I guess, multi-colored if you want to apply the expression to the Eurozone. What it means though is that, without a unique edge, all VCs can only offer one, commoditized benefit: money.

For 199 Ventures, transparency is a unique hook, but their real edge comes from a combination of two additional strengths:

• 🔎 Owned distribution

• 📈 Marketing expertise

These two components are both deeply rooted in 199 Ventures’ DNA and form a core part of their investment thesis: as development cycles get shorter, distribution is becoming the biggest lever startups can pull to win.

The focus on marketing also has a huge impact on why Brun’s day-to-day is quite different from that of your average VC.

The Day-to-Day of a Modern VC

The breakdown of Brun’s week look something like this:

• 1/3 content creation

• 1/3 meetings with founders

• 1/3 startup selection and diligence

This unconventional time split has allowed 199 Ventures to close eight investments this year while building an audience of over 100,000 followers between their newsletter and social media channels. As a fund that preaches the value of marketing they’re walking the walk, with over 20,000,000 impressions on their Instagram content in November.

All of that owned distribution through 199 Ventures is then another advantage founders can use to reach new customers.

To me, this model sounds a lot like the way a record label works.

The goal in both scenarios is to find promising talent early, sign them, and then help them reach their full potential. Many years ago, when I was still producing music, the very best labels I worked with were the ones with the largest built-in distribution networks.

Building that distribution is not easy and creates a real moat for the labels, or in this case the fund, that controls it.

For Brun, the process of building an audience online didn’t come naturally. In the early days Bensaid, who was already deeply experienced in marketing, pushed hard for Brun, publish, experiment, and post daily.

The Trade-Offs of Visibility

For most VCs, content creation is maybe 1-5% of their time. By spending a full 1/3 of his week on marketing, Brun has built not just an audience but also some serious marketing skills.

There’s a good reason many investors do not follow this path—building native distribution is painful. Creating content is a marathon with a steep learning curve, straight up hill. The early days feel like you’re making zero progress while running as hard as you can.

“It’s addictive, but it’s painful,” Brun said. “The reward is small compared to the time it takes.”

With an endless to-do-list, it’s easy to deprioritize marketing in favor of deal sourcing, attending events, or other flashier parts of the job. But, avoiding that early pain means you’d make the same mistake 199 Ventures specifically advises founders against—saving marketing for later.

Investing in public also opens you up to public criticism. You either develop a thick skin quickly or give up before you can see the benefits.

Where Venture is Heading Next

Venture capital is no longer the “cottage industry” of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The mega-funds like a16z, Sequoia, and NEA are playing a totally different game fueled by brand name, prestige, and fund size.

For new investors to break into this market the old story of “we’re smaller so we’re faster” doesn’t cut it anymore either. Being fast and lean is now a requirement, not a differentiator. For new investors to succeed, they need to offer founders more than just fast money.

For 199 Ventures, “more” is total transparency, native distribution, and a network of CMOs available to kick start their investments’ marketing engines.

To make that model work with only two people requires Brun to be everywhere and do a little of everything. If that sounds like your dream too, you’re probably on the right track.

New Funding 💶

9 companies announced €34.53M in new funding last week.

Upcoming Events 🗓

• 🆕 Quand l'IA réinvente la création, la diffusion et l'expérience des médias – December 17

• 🆕 Vibe Code ton App avec Manus 1.5 | Paatch x Manus – December 17

Interesting Jobs 👩‍💻

• 🛠️ Product Manager @ Riot

• 📣 Enterprise Marketing Director @ Ledger

• 📣 Senior Marketing Manager – New Products @ Proton

• 🎨 Senior Product Designer @ Nabla

• 🌍 Localization Growth Manager @ Photoroom

• 📈 Head of Marketing @ Finary

• 🛠️ Senior Product Manager @ Pigment

• 🤝 Stage Business & Partnership Developer @ Pasqal

• ⚙️ GTM Operations Manager @ sunday

• 🧠 Chief Product Officer @ Ekie

• 🛠️ Product Manager @ Agicap

• 📊 B2B Marketing Intern @ Back Market

• 🤖 AI Deployment Strategist – Marseille @ Mistral

• 🔗 Internship: Partnership Development Specialist @ Quandela

What Else I’m Reading 📚

• AI killed my job—real-life stories of how AI is impacting working people's lives (Blood in the Machine)

• Why Excel is AI proof (Semafor)

• America has identified its greatest enemy: Western Europe (Programmable Mutter)

Newsletter Recommendations 🫶

Quiz Answer: A.) 2.2X

While this step up is down from the Q1, 2022 peak step up of 3.3X, it’s climbed significantly from a Q1, 2023 low of 1.5X and is slightly higher than the long-term average.