Bpifrance Le Hub support: a major asset for our portfolio companies

Bpifrance Digital Venture is Bpifrance’s venture capital team. We target high-potential tech companies and make around 15 investments a year, from seed to Series B. As well as offering financial support, we believe that early-stage start-ups’ development can be expedited with bespoke operational support.

This is why we also provide start-ups in our portfolio with Bpifrance Le Hub’s acceleration services. This scheme is unique among French investment funds:

• A team of around 15 staff have been working to support the Bpifrance portfolio since late 2019 (using their skills in product, communication & marketing, client project management for complex sales, recruitment, media & PR, lead generation, etc.).
• A network of 120 external professionals who can offer special expertise (affiliate marketing, SEA, customer services management, product team structuring, etc.). These professionals use their experience at French and international start-ups to help solve the specific problems faced by start-ups in the accelerator programme.

Seed support 🌱

The start-ups involved in the Bpifrance Le Hub “Seed” programme include Mindee (APIs for instant information extraction), Ovrsea (freight broker recently acquired by Bolloré Logistics) and Harvestr (product development management software).

At the crucial start-up stage, Bpifrance Le Hub aims to work with founders to confirm founder-market fit (balancing the characteristics, careers and beliefs of founders with the market they are targeting). This work involves:

• market understanding,
• customer discovery,
• confirming product-market fit,
• designing a 1st sales playbook,
• helping generate initial revenue and doing operational prospecting,
• establishing a strategy to increase visibility, etc.

The goal is to ensure that start-ups can quickly develop by gaining maturity with tools, processes and organisational models.

“We would never have come so far or moved so fast without this programme. You really look at the details,” says Harvestr CEO Valentin Huang.

The scheme is unique, being entirely bespoke and activatable through deliverable designs. For Arthur Barillas, one of the founders at Ovrsea, another Bpifrance DV seed portfolio company:

“Bpifrance Le Hub is a little like the 12th man. They have great instincts when it comes to linking you up with leads, talent and peer-sharing. We rely on them to access people to help, and are sometimes guided by their initiative. We’ve felt truly supported, unlike with other programmes. “

Series A/B support 🚀

At the Series A and B stages, Bpifrance Le Hub adapts its approach and tackles new goals: structuring the organisation and speeding up growth.

This involves specific support in:

• Human resources: two Talent Acquisition Managers are available to start-ups for headhunting C-level executives and “Heads of”. As a result, Livestorm acquired a new Head of Sales from the USA with 10 years’ experience at English-speaking software publishers. The talent experts support start-ups as they reflect on everything from how to build a company culture to optimising staff onboarding and managing professional careers and developments.
• Business development and lead generation: there is a team responsible for running the corporate partner network and linking up businesses. For example, Planity met the teams at L’Oréal, who have since recommended the solution to various salons. They were also introduced to Carmila, which has resulted in the solution being rolled out at La Barbe de Papa salons.
• Strategic and organisational thinking: thanks to special workshops and peers sharing their experiences, the Bpifrance Le Hub team contributes to solving a range of problems. Finally, some start-ups have had their Sales Commission Plans comprehensively reviewed, been given tips about managing their product team, or received recommendations on how to optimise product architecture, etc.

Garantme, Kactus, Livestorm, Snapshift, Loisirs Enchères, Vekia, Data Impact and Wizaplace are all start-ups that have received investment from Bpifrance Digital Venture and been supported by Bpifrance Le Hub through Series A. The support scheme aims to be as tailored as possible, and takes into account elements specific to sector, positioning and go-to-market for each individual start-up.

Bpifrance Le Hub has had a major impact on team structure at Wizaplace. CEO Eric Alessandrini explains:

“Le Hub has really helped us achieve a better structure for sales, the product team and finance. This was very important.”

He adds, “We were lucky to be in a position where we could choose our investors, and the operational support they could provide was one of our selection criteria.”

Want to find out more about funding and support mechanisms for digital start-ups at Bpifrance? Please write us at digitalventure@bpifrance.fr