European VC firm Emblem raises $85 million for its initial fund

Emblem, a relatively new European VC firm based in Paris, is announcing the final closing of its first fund. Eighteen months after the first closing, the Emblem team managed to secure €80 million in total (around $85 million at current exchange rates).

This is no small feat in the current funding environment. According to Atomico’s latest State of European Tech report, in 2024, venture funding fell for the third year in a row. One of the main reasons for this is that acquisitions and IPOs aren’t really happening right now.

As a result, VC as an investment category is less attractive than it used to be. Several VC firms are struggling to raise follow-on funds despite the current artificial intelligence boom, which could potentially represent a huge investment opportunity.

But that didn’t stop Emblem from reaching its hard cap — the maximum amount that it had originally set to raise. Founded by Bénédicte de Raphélis Soissan and Guillaume Durao, the duo had already made some interesting investments as business angels before creating Emblem. They invested in crypto trading card game Sorare, pet insurance startup Dalma, and cultivated meat company Gourmey, to name a few.

They wanted to go one step further with a proper VC firm, which to Emblem, a seed investment firm that wants to make 25 to 30 investments with its initial fund. Ideally, they would rather lead or co-lead seed rounds with tickets ranging from €500,000 to €3 million. But the firm is willing to follow another lead investor if there’s a good opportunity, too.

Emblem has already invested in 16 startups since its first closing in March 2023. TechCrunch has covered a few of them. Examples include:

• Pivot, a procurement tool and Coupa competitor.
• The Mobile-First Company, a B2B mobile app studio drawing inspiration from Voodoo and other consumer app studio.
• Altrove, a new materials company using AI and lab automation to speed up research.
• Volta, an online commerce platform like Shopify, but focused exclusively on B2B transactions.

It’s a diverse portfolio when it comes to area of focus, but also geographical focus. “We’ve made 16 investments. To give you an idea, there are eight of them in France, six in the Nordics — Denmark, Sweden — and then we made one in the U.S. and one in Italy,” de Raphélis Soissan told TechCrunch.

Emblem’s core focus remains on France and the Nordic tech ecosystem. It has more than 200 limited partners who invested in the first fund, including family offices and tech entrepreneurs, such as the founders of Unity, Pleo, Qonto, 3shape, Spendesk, Voodoo, Pennylane, JobandTalent, Ledger and Zendesk. They make up for over half of the total amount.

The rest has been raised from several funds of funds, as well as commitments from both EIFO (the Danish sovereign fund) and Bpifrance (the French sovereign fund). Emblem is already thinking about its next fund, which should be roughly the same size as this one.

“Now we’ve got a bit of time when we won’t need to raise. So we’re going to savor it. But you never want to be off-market,” de Raphélis Soissan said. “So, since it takes you four years to deploy, and we’re about halfway through, that means that in a year’s time, we’ll have to start all over again.”