There are few areas of venture finance as exciting as financial services – fintech – and Africa and it has fallen to Antoine Maurel, investment manager at Orange Digital Ventures, the corporate venture capital unit of the eponymous France-based telecoms operator, to cover both.
Yann Kandelman, head of investments and development at Orange Digital Ventures, said: “Antoine is in charge of all fintech as well as Africa-focused investment opportunities.
“In addition to venture, he also works in my team on some corporate development opportunities. In this context, he recently coordinated our €75m ($80m) investment in Jumia, and he is now representing us as a board observer in the company. So I would definitely say he is a rising star.”
Founded in 2012, internet company Jumia is also backed by strategic investors Axa, Goldman Sachs, Millicom, MTN and Rocket Internet.
Maurel said he had been in the team of three who created the Orange Digital Ventures fund in the beginning of 2015.
Beyond helping in the launch, Maurel said his successes included “helping five of our startups in which we invested to make the most of the Orange group assets and help three of them as a board member, which is a heavy responsibility”.
His five deals are point-of-sale service Wynd, crowdfunding platform Kisskissbankbank, online video provider Afrostream, blockchain development company Chain and fintech company Afrimarket.
Climbing the peaks and troughs of dealmaking seems to have come naturally for Maurel, a “big fan of mountaineering” and a former consultant at Sofrecom who joined Orange, one of its clients, in 2008.
And he said he was attracted to corporate venturing as “I have always been tech savvy and did an engineering school”.
He went on: “I became very interested in startups, reading a lot of tech articles when I was in my previous position at Orange as a partnerships manager involving Amazon, Linkedin, Foursquare, Wikipedia. The strategic side and the outputs of a deal for a corporate makes the job even more interesting.
“Second, I had the opportunity to participate to the creation and the launch of the initiative at Orange which was a huge challenge and a great adventure.”
However, dealing in parallel with all the different tasks which are encompassed as an investment manager is a challenge, as is “explaining internally how we can work properly with a startup, why we are on startup’s side in front of Orange and explain the VC world rules to our internal partners”.
As a result of such experiences, he gave three tips for others. “CVCs should never force the synergies with the corporate before the startup is strong enough to be able to deal with the corporate in addition to other customers, they should protect their startups from the burdens of the corporate and make the most of their assets – be clear, reassure and ensure that sensitive information from the startup does not flow from the startup to the corporate, and they should make investment decisions as fast as possible.”