60 million euros raised. A portfolio of ten Deeptech startups. And a tense microphone, not towards the next pitch, but towards the founders themselves. OVNI Capital is not a fund like the others. From its beginnings, the management company founded by Augustin Sayer, Arnaud Laurent and Thomas Renaudin is betting, to capture the best opportunities in Seed Deeptech, it is no longer enough to check the classic VC boxes. You have to create a platform. Build an audience. Open a permanent dialogue channel with those who invent, often far from radars, the technological bricks of tomorrow.
Then UFO Capital becomes a Media-Led fund. With Matthieu Stefani (GDIY) at the maneuver, the fund chose to produce content before even announcing its first tickets. The podcast as a sourcing tool, the newsletter as a resonance fund, events as a place of creative friction, capital becomes conversation.
This strategy evokes an increasingly quoted parallel in the world of the venture, the case of Harry Stebbings and its 20VC fund. Launched in 2020 with barely $ 8.3 million, 20VC first positioned itself as a micro-fonds backed by a podcast. A simple content derivative, we thought at the start. Today, the platform has tens of millions of views on Tiktok and Youtube, welcomes personalities like Sam Altman or Marc Benioff, and allows Stebbings to access leading deals. “The media has really helped,” he recognizes himself. It is not its technical background that opens the doors, but the ability to create a relationship of influence with the founders.
OVNI Capital is part of a neighboring logic, but by injecting a technological depth and a European culture of the SEED. For Augustin Sayer, this approach responds to a reality, in Deeptech, storytelling is often a brake, when it should be an accelerator. The fund therefore intends to give voice to often sub-media profiles (engineers, researchers, founders of complex products) and document their trajectory to strengthen their attractiveness.
The fund claims to support projects with strong technological rupture in sectors deemed critical, and support them as soon as priming towards an international presence. Of its first ten investments, 80 % have already joined a foreign fund with capital.
The arrival of Marie Outtier, ex-co-depth of Aiden.ai (bought by Twitter), strengthens this ambition. After having operated at First Minute Capital, she joined UFO as General Partner to structure the international Dealflow and develop the product dimension of the fund. “” I chose UFO for its unique approach which combines technological requirement, international dimension and conviction that the next European tech champions will emerge from diversified ecosystems“, She explains.
With the support of Bpifrance, PwC and GSMC, UFO structures its presence in long time. A third of the fund will be used to follow the most promising participations beyond the SEED. The other party will be used to continue investing early, but with a decisive advantage, a tense microphone before the others.
In an ecosystem where LPS expect visibility, where founders seek partners capable of making them readable very quickly, and where competition for the best files intensifies, Ovni Capital experiments with another way of doing VC, more open, more distributed, more narrative.
Since its launch, OVNI Capital has formed a portfolio of ten startups which concretely translate its thesis: to engage early alongside founders carrying technological ruptures in sectors of critical importance. We find there Axeptioactor already well established in the RGPD compliance, with its consent management solution deployed on more than 75,000 sites. In the medical field, Resolve Stroke develops an ultra-fast stroke diagnostic tool thanks to AI, while Bacta And Spaictra Explore the new borders of biotech, with applications ranging from synthetic materials to cell therapy.
Industrial verticalization is also present, through Trout Softwarepositioned on the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure (OT), or EPYRwhich offers high -efficiency thermal storage solutions for heavy industry. The energy transition and the resilience of the supply chains are not to be outdone with Lithosquarewhich mobilizes AI for responsible mining exploration, and Ncodinwhose ultra-rapid semiconductor technology intends to shake up the standards of high performance calculation.
Finally, Tranched.fi Experiences the tokenization of loans via a blockchain securitization platform, and Mokn Develops advanced protocols to combat digital identity theft.
