While the industry represents 25% of GDP, only 1% of startups in the sector find funding. To fill this paradox, OSS VENTURES has built a counter-current model. The fund announces that it has already collected 44 million euros for its new vehicle and is aiming for 75 million. To talk about it we welcome its CEO and co-founder Renan Devillières.
In the world of venture capital, we don’t talk much about factories. We prefer platforms, marketplaces, horizontal AI models, however, it is precisely in this blind spot that Renan Devillières has chosen to settle. Founder of OSS Ventures, the subscription to his new fund is taking place in a capital market that he himself describes as “extremely tense”.
This first closing marks five years of a venture builder who launched companies before even structuring a formal investment vehicle. OSS Ventures started with 30 projects, launched 22, and today boasts deployments in more than 3,800 factories around the world, less than a fifth of which are in France.
The fund is therefore a continuity tool to amplify what already exists. Among the subscribers, we find unusual profiles in the VC ecosystem. The American industrial family office associated with Teknor Apex, presented as “the largest producer of plastic pellets”. Decathlon Pulse, the investment arm of the sports giant, works alongside the Peugeot family office. Industrialists who have decided to invest in tools to modernize their own world.
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The diagnosis: a structural imbalance
OSS Ventures’ thesis can be summed up in one sentence: “industry represents 25% of GDP and 0.7% of startups. Basically, there aren’t enough of them. »
This figure summarizes the angle of attack, the industrial sector weighs heavily in the real economy but remains almost absent from the startup ecosystem. Not for lack of interest, but because industrial software imposes constraints that generalist funds struggle to absorb, and that founders struggle to overcome alone.
Renan Devillières lists them frankly. Firstly, on safety, in a factory, if you malfunction, people could die. » The Silicon Valley mantra collides with real-world physics here. Then on competition, selling industrial software does not amount to beating a direct competitor, but to convincing a factory director to prioritize this subject among five other emergencies. And finally on cybersecurity, factories are today particularly exposed, even “more attacked than banks”.
Build rather than select
Another radical choice from OSS Ventures: not to invest in existing startups, but to create new ones. “Instead of investing in companies that already exist, we create companies that don’t exist,” summarizes Devillières.
The venture studio model makes it possible to pool the heaviest building blocks (ERP integrations, technical architecture, cybersecurity) instead of having each founder carry them. The teams are not starting from scratch: “they have six full-time coders with them,” he explains.
The identification of opportunities is itself field-based: “we go to the factories,” he says soberly. The team observes, identifies the irritants, then proposes to develop a solution. With a commercial logic that disarms resistance: the solution is free until it works, only afterward does the customer pay, and, above all, talk about it to their peers. In a sector where industrial networks are dense and references are decisive, this word of mouth is worth gold.
America as a compass
On the question of European industrial sovereignty, Renan Devillières does not bother with postures. Its reading is economic, and less ideological. “In the United States, in the next two years, there will be as much factory construction as in the last ten years. This is not the case in Europe. »
Cheaper energy, massive public incentives, an industrial investment dynamic without equivalent on the Old Continent: for an industrial software publisher, going where factories are built is not a political choice, but market evidence.
A builder’s horizon
In a sector where sales cycles are long and trust is gained very slowly, OSS Ventures does not play the same role as most funds. Renan Devillières distinguishes the horizon of the fund, ten to twelve years, from that of the holding company, which he envisages on a completely different tempo. “My exit strategy is when I’m dead,” he says, with the seriousness of someone who is only half-joking.
On the culture of failure, he observes a persistent cultural gap with the United States: “You have the right to fail once, maybe twice, in the US, whereas in Europe, you have to be flawless. » In an environment where the cost of error is structurally high, learning to iterate without disqualifying yourself is de facto a rare skill.
At its core, OSS Ventures asks a simple question: why has software transformed finance, healthcare or retail, but so little industry? Renan Devillières bets that the answer is not in the technology, but in the method: you have to go to the factories, understand their constraints, and build tools that work when errors cost more than a bug to correct.
A bet on a segment that is still not very crowded and, according to him, largely underfunded.
To finance its development, OSS Ventures raised 14 million euros in 3 rounds, notably from renowned investors such as Tikehau Capital, the French Tech Accélération 2 fund of France 2030, managed on behalf of the State by Bpifrance, Établissements Peugeot Frères and Business Angels such as Max Pog, expert in studio start-ups.
The OSS Ventures portfolio includes: MyC, Relief, Bonx, Fabriq, Kraaft, Mercateam And Stargazr.
