From Zenly To Side, Alongside Payfit, Ibanfirst, Sourced and the 500+ Kima Ventures Portfolio…
Remember… In november 2015, we were leading the Series A round of Zenly. In 2016, we did the same with Ibanfirst, Sourced and Payfit. Today we’re leading a 5M round in Side, alongside Connect Ventures, Fly Ventures, Aglae and a couple of Angel Investors. Our check size for those deals are in the 2 to 4 millions range.
Some people are wondering what the difference is between those deals and the ones we do through Kima Ventures. Even though the purposes slightly vary, it’s pretty continuous.
Kima Ventures supports the ecosystem broadly with the following strategy: 100 new deals a year (half in France approx.), $150k one-off tickets, agnostic in terms of stage, sector, deal size and geography. This quantitative approach has clear pros:
It allows us to see hundreds of new companies in the dealflow every week which is a great way to keep a solid overview on what’s happening out there.
As we are four in the team, efficiency is in our DNA, we don’t get stuck into the most common and fatal syndromes that often strike in the venture capital industry such as comfort, inconsistency or inactivity…
Our reputation being the cornerstone to source the best deals and work with the best entrepreneurs, and despite the volumes we are dealing with, we must support our portfolio companies. Therefore we’re building our in-house platform of resources and experts in a unique way compared to what other investors do.
The limits are obvious too… Kima Ventures follows a statistical law: Our returns are capped to 2/3x overtime and we are not building very strong relationships with our entrepreneurs.
Yet… Venture Capital is all about relationships and ambition.
That’s why we also compete and commit to build strong, long lasting relationships with very few ambitious entrepreneurs that consequently fuels the power law of our returns. And this is only possible by following a clear and consistant investment thesis. Ours is the following:
We back stellar teams of at least 10 to 15 people and to do so we conduct individual interviews with every single person in the team.
Those companies have a real, solid, defensive technological or product edge compared to their competitors.
Their CEO envisions a unique and ambitious future we hadn’t thought of before and that yet sounds obvious.
All those companies are post-adoption, pre-acceleration. We tend to overfund them compared to what any other venture capital firm would do in our position (at least in France/Europe), in order to allow those companies to fuel their ambition at full potential. Zenly had 10k daily active users when we decided to back them in September 2015 (7M€ round), Payfit were roughly doing 15K in MRR 9 months ago (4M€ round)…etc
Please welcome Side, a new work experience for flexible missions, as the last addition to our great Series A portfolio entrepreneurs :)
Stay Tuned.