Partech

Fighting fire with fire! 🔥 Our own Reza Malekzadeh and portfolio founder Ahmed Achchak joined Andreas Munk Holm on the EUVC podcast to discuss how AI is reshaping cybersecurity and how dynamic, AI-accelerated solutions, such as Qevlar AI, are responding. As Réza explains, cyberattacks are no longer an ‘if,’ but a ‘when,’ with targets ranging from emerging startups to global corporations. That’s why outsiders of the established cybersecurity industry creating new solutions are more important than ever. Like Ahmed says, Qevlar replaces the outdated manual models of cybersecurity with dynamic AI assistants that go beyond freeing up analysts from their repetitive triage roles. They create systems that learn from each attack to automatically build a ‘self-healing’ security stance. Today, it’s the companies that execute fast, build trust through product exposure, and rethink the first principles with modern solutions that will win the war against cyberattackers. Catch the episode in the comments below! 

Happy Friday, Happy Pay! 🛍️ In emerging markets, consumer credit typically carries high interest rates and traditional lending often carries high costs. Traditional Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platforms have helped to fill the gap, but still operate as standalone payment methods bolted on at checkout. Enter Happy Pay. South-Africa based Happy Pay is one of the first closed-loop commerce ecosystems that connects discovery, advertising, payments and financing into a single platform. Its AI reads behavioural signals, transaction patterns, and context to match high-intent consumers with the right products. The result: strong conversion and some of the highest returns on marketing spend. But rather than charging merchants for impressions or clicks, Happy Pay monetises transactions, meaning advertising spend is directly tied to completed sales. That allows merchant spend to fund interest-free installment payments for consumers. Since being founded in 2021, the company has stacked up some major wins: - 750,000+ registered users - 4,000+ merchant partners - Launch of its commerce media layer, Happy Ads - Among the first BNPL players in South Africa to report repayment behaviour to credit bureaus - Named Top African Startup at Deloitte’s VivaTech AfricaTech Awards - A partnership with Ozow, making Happy Pay available to 47M South African bank account holders So, where to now? The team will continue scaling the platform by integrating AI across its ecosystem to improve risk decisioning, fraud prevention and the efficiency of internal software systems. But with 90% of transactions still happening in physical retail, Happy Pay is building a market-first payments product that allows consumers to use it in physical retail environments. That means dramatically increased access to flexible payment options and another step forward in building Africa's leading Ad-Subsidised Payments network. It’s a re-tale for the ages! Read more about Happy Pay in the comments below! 👇 CC: Wesley Billett, Mark Geary, Marie Benrubi, Sabrine Chahrour, Cyril Collon, Tito Cookey-Gam, Tidjane Deme, Lewam Kefela, Matthieu Marchand, Ogugua Osakwe-Adegbite

Easy Peasy! 🫛 e-peas closed a $22M funding round by Crédit Mutuel Innovation with support from @European Innovation Council (EIC), Wallonie Entreprendre, KBC Focus Fund, Otium, NOMAINVEST, The Faktory Fund, and invest.bw. CEO Geoffroy Gosset and CTO Julien De Vos cofounded e-peas to eliminate the operational and environmental costs of industrial and IoT batteries. Today its ultra-low power management products enable electronic devices to operate autonomously from ambient energy sources such as light, vibration, and heat, drastically extending battery lifetime. This latest investment is the recognition of 15 years of research, 20k+ tons of CO2 saved, and a journey that’s taken e-peas to the moon! This funding “will allow us to further scale our commercial activities, enter new high-growth markets, and expand our portfolio to support a wider range of energy-autonomous applications,” said Geoffrey. “Our ambition is to make energy harvesting a standard design choice for sustainable electronics.” Congratulations to the whole team for this latest achievement! Find out more in the comments below. 👇 CC: Romain Lavault, Boris Golden, Alison Imbert, Ariadne Lemieux-Cumberlege, Moritz Steinbrecher

A company’s story isn’t over when the final chapter is closed… 📖 Pierre Marin, CEO and cofounder of RockFi, joined Andréa Bensaid, CEO at Eskimoz, on the LITTLE BIG THINGS podcast to share his personal experience of exits and what they’ve taught him. Before founding RockFi, Pierre Marin built and sold two companies. That showed him some of the easiest mistakes you can make after a liquidity event; overconfident investing, hyperactive investing, and letting capital sit idle. Traditional private banking’s complex products, opaque fees, and dense reports only add fuel to the fire. That’s what inspired him to cofound Rockfi. It’s private wealth management model brings together detailed analytics for a holistic view of assets with a highly personalized, human approach. That means more transparency, efficiency, and flexibility for modern investors. Because the hardest part of a cash-out isn’t making the money. It’s knowing what to do next. Catch the episode in the comments below for a mid-week boost! 👇 Note; the episode is in French

For your Friday listening! 🎧 Our own Rémi Said joined Benjamin WATTINNE on the Sowefund 'Entretien avec un VC' podcast to break down how our Impact Growth strategy reconciles impact with returns. Europe has long lacked the infrastructure to bridge the two. Operating in that gap means balancing “art” (judgment, timing, hands-on support) with “science” (governance, capital, processes). At Partech Impact, each company has a defined impact KPI, expected to be tripled. If not, 50% of the carry is redirected to foundations. That’s how we not just bridge impact and returns, but make them inextricable. Despite a tougher macro and geopolitical backdrop, the opportunity set is stronger than ever with more impact-driven growth companies reaching scale across Europe. Here xFarm Technologies and Makersite get namedropped! Catch the episode in the comments below!👇 Note: this episode is in French

From lab-grown to industry-grown! 🔬 PARIMA has produced duck at multi-ton scale in a single 22,000-liter production run, working with Sydney-based Vow, which operates the largest cultivated meat manufacturing facility built to date. This first attempt ran at full volume with a 99% lower production cost than earlier runs and no performance loss. "Economic viability for cultivated meat is no longer an extrapolation from pilot runs. It's here," said PARIMA co-founder and CEO Nicolas Morin-Forest "Our team spent more than seven years building the biology and process behind this." Cultivated meat at Sub €10/kg production cost is closer than most observers expected, and Parima is leading the way, already the first company in the world cleared for two species! Congratulations to Nicolas Morin-Forest, George Peppou (Vow Executive Director), and the whole team that made this happen! Find out more in the comments below 👇 Cc Alison Imbert

Arrivals, expansion, and fresh perspectives. 💥 This last month’s been pedal to the metal, and we’ve assembled all the latest from the portfolio into our Newsletter. In a glance; - Flease joined the portfolio and raised a €13M Funding Round - 9 portfolio stars ranked in La French Tech’s Next 40/120 - Shakers announced its expansion into France - 4 portfolio champs made it into the Sifted 100: France and Benelux - Channable acquired Metrion - Akeneo acquired Pricing HUB - Ornikar acquired En Voiture Simone But we’re not done! On our side of the fence, we won Private Equity Magazine’s 2026 Venture Fund Award as well as dropped the insights from our AI Councils. Meanwhile, Tidjane Deme, Simone Riva Violetta, and Rémi Said appeared across 5 podcast episodes! Plenty to celebrate. Even more to unpack. Head to the comments to get straight to it!

A historic step, ten years in. Bridgepoint Group is investing €200M in Skello to accelerate its mission with frontline teams across Europe. From day one, Skello has built for the people who keep the real economy running: those in restaurants, hotels, construction sites, retail, services, and healthcare. They represent more than half of Europe’s workforce. Today, more than 30,000 companies and 700,000 people work with Skello every day. Partech Growth led Skello’s Series B in 2021, and we’re continuing the journey alongside XAnge. Bridgepoint’s investment also marks the second time it has backed a company previously supported by Partech Growth, after Brevo in 2020. What stands out about Skello is the combination of ambition and discipline: strong growth, profitability, and a product built for the realities of frontline work. Reaching profitability in 2025 marked an important milestone. This new chapter is about going further and faster: doubling down on AI, expanding across Europe, and cementing that leadership. Congratulations to Quitterie Mathelin-Moreaux, Emmanuelle F., and the whole Skello team on this milestone. And welcome to Bridgepoint Group. CC Omri Benayoun, Bruno CREMEL, André François-Poncet, Andrew Whiting, Tiffany Chhoa, Mohamed Damak, Louis Dessal, Victor Huberson, Alexis Lancien, Aya Murr, Paul Soulis, Paul Vider

Time for a new #StartupSpotlight! This week, we're featuring Qevlar AI, the AI SOC platform for Self-Improving Defense trusted by over 1,500 organizations, which makes security teams stronger over time. 🛡️ Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are drowning. Analysts face endless alerts, most of which turn out to be false positives, and burn hours on repetitive triage and enrichment while real threats slip through the gaps. Meanwhile, attackers are moving faster than ever. Today, exploitation often happens before a patch even exists. Qevlar AI is rewriting how SOCs work. 🤖 Founded in 2023 by Ahmed Achchak and Hamza Sayah, Qevlar was built by two machine learning engineers who saw the SOC problem from the inside. Their partnership started with a win at Huawei's 2018 malware detection hackathon. That win pulled Ahmed deeper into cybersecurity through roles at Natixis and Minautor, while Hamza built ML systems at Octopus Energy and CircleCI. 5 years later, they reunited around a shared conviction: SOC teams deserved far better than the manual, reactive workflows they were stuck with. So they built it. Qevlar’s platform autonomously investigates every alert, connects related activity into a single incident story, and closes the loop from containment to compliance follow-up. But the real game changer is its self-improving engine. Every investigation automatically feeds Qevlar's contextual intelligence layer and makes the system smarter. The longer it runs, the harder the environment becomes to attack. The success speaks for itself. 📈 ● 10x reduction in investigation time, down to 3 minutes ● 100% of alerts investigated with full depth and context ● 24/7 non-stop investigation ● Zero compromise on quality while handling growing alert volumes The industry has taken notice. Qevlar was named Best Partner for Innovation by Orange Cyberdefense, won the Growth Award at Forum InCyber, and took home the 2025 MSP Today Product of the Year Award. 🏆 So, what's next? Plenty. In May 2026, Qevlar announced a new set of AI agents that closes one of enterprise security's most persistent gaps: the divide between SOC and Vulnerability Management teams. The new capabilities let teams correlate CVEs with live incident data for real-time risk prioritization, automatically identify asset owners to speed up remediation, and autonomously hunt for active exploitation. They'll be generally available in Fall 2026. As Ahmed puts it: "Most AI SOC tools optimize for speed. We are building for compounding defense. That only happens when you break down the silos between security teams, connect every signal across the security stack, and make the system learn from past cases." Qevlar is also expanding fast across the Atlantic. The company recently hired Corentin Le Reun as VP, Americas, to build out its New York office. Qevlar is hiring across teams and regions, with roles open to talent anywhere in the world. 🌍 Check out their career page in the comments below! 👇

Smaller markets, bigger ambitions. 🌍 Our own Simone Riva Violetta made a double feature on the Startuprad.io podcast with host Joern Menninger! In the second episode, they discussed ‘European Venture Capital: Efficiency, IPOs, and AI Defensibility.’ As Simone explains, smaller markets can be turned into an asset. Founders don’t have the luxury of staying local and think international from day one. But IPOs in Europe aren’t the endgame that they are in the US. Capital markets are thinner, outcomes less reliable, and for many companies, exit paths look very different. That brings it back to the fundamentals discussed in episode one. Clear ambitions, deep market understanding, and survivability without external capital come first. Meaningful venture capital follows. Catch episode two in the comments below!