Serena

🏞️ What #NatureTech innovations are VCs hyped about right now? Serena’s managing partner, Xavier Lorphelin, reveals key insights for The NatureTech Memos: 📊 Innovations are thriving in the Monitoring, Reporting, Verification (MRV) space. We're scouting for unique data solutions to highlight biodiversity loss as more than a regulatory challenge. 📈 Our Nature Tech Report identifies MRV and Biodiversity credits as the top category, with $204M in early-stage funding, representing 31% of the total. 💧Water is vital, yet its management is often inefficient. We are excited about start-ups developing decentralized solutions to drive efficiency in water management, similar to the energy sector’s transformation. 📈Our Nature Tech report showed significant growth in this area, with funding increasing from $48M in 2022 to $367M in 2023. 🌟 When it comes to Nature Tech startups, we’re particularly impressed by CarbonFarm, which is making significant strides by leveraging AI and satellite imagery for emissions monitoring, carbon-credit certification, and brokering, initially focusing on rice crops. Check the comment section to discover other notable startups that have caught our attention, as well as our Nature Tech report and other areas of Nature Tech innovation that top VCs are excited about!👇 Ollie Potter

How to make your mark in VC? 👩🚀 Recently, we hosted a panel at Serena in collaboration with baby vc. Paul Moriou, Principal, teamed up with Ahmed Mougou, Head of Baby VC France, to share insights on succeeding in venture capital. The 3 tips we walked away with: 🤝 Building strategic relationships with investors, entrepreneurs, and talents is essential for collaboration opportunities. Keeping your portfolio companies in investors' minds secures future funding and attracts top talent. ⚾ Seeking mentors from other funds provides diverse perspectives and valuable guidance. 🛠️ Junior investors play a crucial role in spotting emerging trends and shaping investment strategies. Recognizing patterns, learning from mistakes, and being transparent about them enhance personal growth and credibility. A big thank you to all the aspiring VCs who participated! Your insightful questions and energy made the discussion incredibly enriching and humbling.🌟

📆 Save the date for B2B Rocks 🎸, the coolest B2B SaaS event in 🇫🇷! Sébastien Le Roy, Partner at Serena, will take the stage again on September 26th, to share some exclusive learnings from our flagship study: the Serena European SaaS Benchmark (more information coming 🔜, stay tuned ;))! Join us to meet our team, industry leaders, innovators, and visionaries, and explore the latest trends and insights in the #B2B #SaaS space. Get your tickets to learn, chat, and party below👇 📍Venue: STATION F #Growth #SaaSevent

Excited that Décideurs Corporate Finance is highlighting our partnership with Electra, the European specialist in fast charging for electric vehicles! 🔋 Backing Electra in 2021, shortly after Aurelien de Meaux and Julien Belliato founded it, was a natural continuation of our prior partnership with Aurélien on Cheerz. Following the first fundraising, our investment team (Xavier Lorphelin, Paul Moriou) and Operating Team (Jerome Stioui, Emilie Stevelinck Benayad) partnered with Electra’s leadership to accelerate market expansion, recruit key talent, implement sales processes, secure financial partners, and more. ⏱️ Working hand in hand in the same direction and sharing actionable operational solutions saved the Electra stellar team 2 years in commercial execution and provided the space to step back, gain perspective, and ask the right questions, especially regarding the target organization. 🆙 Fast forward to today, Electra is one of Europe’s fastest-growing #climatetech startups. It boasts a team of 160 experts, has joined the French Tech Next40, and is on track to become a European leader. The company operates in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Spain, to provide 14,500 fast charging points by 2030. The future is summed up in one word: Acceleration! It's impressive to witness the remarkable execution of the strategic orientations defined by Electra's management and their impeccable implementation in developing the company. We at Serena are grateful to have been part of this journey from the very beginning! Thank you Tom Laufenburger for telling the story of this emblematic partnership 🙌 Read it below ⬇️

Celebrating 16 years of Serena ventures! 🎉 In 2008, philippe hayat, Marc Fournier, and Xavier Lorphelin founded Serena, the VC they wished they had as entrepreneurs: a hands-on long-term partner that goes beyond capital injection, working directly with companies' leaders to achieve their goals. Fast forward to today, we're a team of 30 with the mission to support the success of innovative and ambitious entrepreneurs to serve a better world. Our growth is deeply intertwined with the amazing individuals and companies we have partnered with over the years. To honor this shared path, we invited our incredible alumni to join us in celebrating our 16th anniversary last week, July 4th. We came together to share our favorite Serena memories and create a Talent Mural 🎓 (If you know us, you know how much we love fresks and murals🍀;)) Thank you to everyone who has been part of our journey!

Thank you, Leaders League, for featuring us in the "Leading" section of the 2024 ranking for private equity and venture capital investment funds 🙌 For those who don't know us yes: a few facts about us ;) ➡️ Serena is a leading investment fund in Europe, established in 2008 by three entrepreneurs, philippe hayat, Marc Fournier, and Xavier Lorphelin, with €750 million under management across seven different funds. ➡️ In 2014, we pioneered the Operating Program in Europe. We put together a full-time team of 7 people made of former entrepreneurs and serial C-levels. They work closely with our investment team to make a difference in our entrepreneurs’ journey by addressing operational challenges. This program earned us the France Digitale Operating Talent Award in 2023 🏆 ➡️ We are now a team of 30, backing innovative and ambitious entrepreneurs to serve a better world. We focus on AI, SaaS, Climate Tech,  Internet Infrastructure, and Impact. ➡️ In total, we have backed nearly 100 companies, including Dataiku, Malt, Electra, Descartes Underwriting, Accenta.ai, and Lifen. Our exit success stories include Aramis Auto (acquired by Peugeot), The Fork (acquired by Tripadvisor), Cheerz (acquired by Cewe), iBanFirst (acquired by Marlin Fund), and Dataiku.  It is to the continued trust of these companies, the trust of our teams, investors, and partners that we owe the success of our journey; so thank you all! We're looking forward to new milestones with you 🧗

Electra and Jimmy, two Serena companies, are featured in the Sifted list of Europe’s fastest-growing climate tech startups! 🔋 Electra is the first French pure player in the fast-charging of electric vehicles and secured a €304m Series B funding earlier this year. The company deploys and operates fast-charging stations with a clear ambition: facilitate the adoption of electric vehicles through a vast, fast, and efficient charging network. 🏭 Also based in France, Jimmy is developing nuclear micro-reactors. Their technology delivers affordable decarbonized industrial heat, offering a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Additionally, Jimmy has been awarded €32 million in state support as the laureate of the "Innovative Nuclear Reactors" call for projects under the France2030 initiative. Backing these innovative and ambitious startups reflects our faith in their ability to advance sustainability and build a better world. Congratulations teams! 

metrobloks, a cutting-edge data center infrastructure startup, has raised $5.2M in an oversubscribed seed round to develop high-performance data centers in urban metro markets, addressing the increasing demand for low latency computing driven by advancements in AI and other latency-sensitive data workloads 🏙️. The round is led by Current Equity Partners, with proud backing from our team at Serena through Serena Data Ventures II. In the past year, AI capabilities have increasingly been made accessible to consumers. Recent developments and product launches have underscored that AI is becoming ubiquitous, integrated directly into edge and endpoint devices. Traditional data centers, often located far from end-users, are not built to accommodate AI workloads, and retrofitting them is complex and expensive. After looking at these challenges and discussing them with many stakeholders, we became convinced that the solution would require a new type of data center. This is where Metrobloks steps in.  Metrobloks’ mission is to address the increasing demand for low-latency data solutions, which positions itself as a key partner to hyperscalers. Their differentiated approach leverages software and AI to enable modularity, scalability, and high performance, paving the way for a new generation of data centers. The team's unique combination of expertise positions them at the forefront of providing high-performance data center solutions tailored to AI/ML, IoT, gaming, and streaming services' unique needs. The metrobloks team (Ernest Popescu, Scott Couzens, Alejandro Maldonado, Ryan Shea) is a powerhouse of expertise, combining the talents of data center experts, real estate developers, and tech innovators with experience at industry giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, and Iron Mountain. With a track record of enabling over 12GW capacity across 25 countries, their innovative and sustainable approach is set to redefine the data center landscape. We’re thrilled to partner with them on this journey! Floriane de Maupeou Bertrand Diard Guillaume Decugis Matthieu Lavergne Juliette Ast

🌴  The first season of our Program for Acceleration of Leadership and Mixity (PALM) wraps up... and will return in 2025! ♀️ Gender diversity and equality remain pressing issues in the tech world, especially within startups and scale-ups. The statistics are stark: only 2% of venture capital funds are currently raised by female founding teams, and women hold just 25% of leadership roles on average. To tackle these challenges, we need to focus on empowering female leaders and fostering a company culture that genuinely embraces diversity. PALM was created with this mission in mind by Marie-Capucine Lemétais from Ring Capital, Emilie Stevelinck Benayad, and Elodie Charles from Serena. Launched in January 2024, PALM is designed to accelerate progress in these critical areas within our portfolio companies. This year, the 5-month program brought together around twenty women founders and senior leaders from companies like Malt, Descartes Underwriting, and Pretto. 🥅 Goal: build a community of female leaders and provide them with essential tools to develop their leadership skills. With over twenty hours of coaching workshops and training on executive presence and communication, participants benefited from the insights of top-notch speakers and coaches. Additionally, a mixed task force of CEOs and HR leaders from participating companies worked on creating inclusive and diverse corporate cultures. Many Thanks to all the participants for this successful edition and to the Electra team for having us for the celebrations 🤩 Looking ahead to 2025, PALM aims to expand its reach by inviting more funds and companies to participate, amplifying its impact, and fostering conditions that promote gender diversity in as many organizations as possible. We are committed to making PALM a benchmark in the industry ;) Stay tuned for more exciting updates! 

Odaseva, the leading enterprise data security platform for Salesforce, has successfully raised a $54 million Series C funding round! This brings Odaseva's total funding to over $90 million. Silver Lake led the round with participation from existing investors Serena, F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads, and new investors Eurazeo and Crescent Cove Advisors LP. 🔍 Enterprises worldwide are increasingly digitizing strategic processes involving sensitive data, which requires high levels of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The rapid advancements in AI and stringent compliance standards further intensify these requirements. This is where Odaseva steps in. 🔐 Odaseva is Salesforce's trusted data security platform, protecting over 100 million users, including many Global Fortune 500 companies. The platform provides end-to-end encryption, optimizes Salesforce availability to 99.99%, and offers top-tier Recovery Point and Time Objectives (RPO/RTO). As Sovan Bin, CEO and Founder of Odaseva puts it, "Data sits at the core of large organizations, so we know trust with our customers is more important than ever before. We’re proud that Odaseva’s commitment to data security exceeds the requirements of even the most complex, highly regulated businesses in the world." 🌟 With this new funding, Odaseva plans to accelerate product development, and expand global reach. The company will keep hiring top-tier talent at the executive level, following the recent additions of Steven Corbin as Chief Financial & Operating Officer, Matthew Johnston as Chief Revenue Officer, and Susan Lansing as Chief People Officer. We've been part of Odaseva's journey since 2017 and are excited to see their continued innovation and growth in the data security space; congratulations team! Learn more in Ingrid Lunden’s story in TechCrunch👇 Bertrand Diard Floriane de Maupeou