French VC firm Define Its new funds, Duffy Blue, are announcing the first closure. The firm has raised $ 200 million (about $ 215 million at current exchange rates). It is expected to raise a maximum of $ 250 million ($ 270 million) by the end of the year.
The most notable investment in the past of Daphne includes the back market, Smile, Hubscale and Pascal. Overall, the firm has invested in 70 European startups since 2015.
With its latest funds, Duffy plans to invest in 40 more startups. Limited partners in Dafini Blue include Credit Motel Arcia, BP Confess, European Investment Fund, Pro BTP and Swin Capital Partners.
Founder partner Perry Eric Libovici told me, “We need to ask ourselves how we both can distinguish ourselves, and when we invest in new projects, we can support sustainable technologies or services.”
“Because at the end of the day, there are bicycles, and we can see that in a fixed moment, either stabilizes the market, or is dominated by American players, or finally, there was no success to start with it.”
Although most Vice -Chancellor firms have mentioned artificial intelligence in every other sentence, Defani wants to emphasize as the basic element of the next wave of innovation (large -scale): life sciences, biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics.
“When you talk about quantum computing, well, well, quantum computing is the basic physics with hardware and software,” said Labovice. He also said that big samples of language are mathematical achievements that are first and most important.
As a result, the Dafny is recruiting various profiles to join the team. For example, a PhD graduate and PhD student is included in the investment team.
“There is another factor that is a new trend. A new generation of researchers is very open to commercializing their core and implemented research, as they see all their friends starting companies around them,” said Labovice, a new generation of researchers.
While French Universities are Sorting one side Dafini, a part of his budget to attract US researchers, says it did not choose to focus on basic science because of this.
“This is a coincidence. We started it long before this trend.” Of course, Dafney is open to invest in American researchers who are launching startups in Europe.
After that, Dafney will have to deploy this newly raised capital and prove that it has discovered an effective investment strategy. “Lifting is not ending in itself,” said Libuvisi.