Having joined the insurance-focused corporate venture capital unit Munich Re/HSB Ventures, part of the world’s largest reinsurer, Munich Re, in March last year, investment director Sophie Dingreville is heading the venture unit’s London, UK office, for which she is currently working on building a team.
Much of her career was devoted to French venture capital firm Iris Capital, where she spent nearly 14 years, having gone through all the steps from investment manager to partner and closed about a dozen investments in total.
At Iris, she focused on €1m to €20m early and late-stage investments in digital economy across Europe, and held nine different board positions over the years.
In addition, she co-managed IrisNext, a seed to growth-stage tech fund launched in 2015 with a joint contribution of €150m as limited partners from French corporates Orange and Publicis, and which announced another closing on €250m last year. She was also part of the investment committee at Cologne-based early-stage fund Capnamic.
Prior to joining Iris, Dingreville had served for two years as a consultant in the media, telecoms and financial industries at management consultants McKinsey & Company, where she completed an internal MBA and developed her skills in corporate strategy, business development and M&A integration.
Jacqueline LeSage Krause, managing director at Munich Re/HSB Ventures and GCV Powerlist 2017 winner, said: “While new to Munich R /HSB Ventures, Sophie is a very experienced VC. The fact that she also led a fund that had two corporates [Orange and Publicis] as limited partners meant she had an interesting take on CVC models prior to joining our team.
“We have welcomed having the perspective of a traditional VC, along with our CVC experience, as we are both strategic and financial in focus.”
Following her will to broaden her international experience, Dingreville made a move to London in 2016, where she briefly served as partner within C4 Ventures, which was striving to raise its first institutional fund at the time.
Dingreville said CVC had a stronger footprint now compared with 10 or 15 years ago, when VCs provided most of the money. “CVCs’ contribution is much bigger on many levels now.”
And so, as soon as she heard that Munich Re was recruiting in London, Dingreville got in touch. She said: “Being the first person to work in the London office, where everything had to be created, was a prospect that fitted at once my entrepreneurial desires and my wish to develop my international competence.”
Two things in particular attracted Dingreville to Munich Re – the seniority of the team, including LeSage Krause, who has more than 15 years’ experience in CVC and is co-chairman of the GCV Symposium 2018, and the unit’s approach to venture, which implies establishing a commercial partnership with the startup first and investing subsequently, rather than the opposite.
In her current role, Dingreville oversees Munich Re’s European activities, and focusing on sourcing deals in insurtech, industrial IoT, data analytics and artificial intelligence. Out of the 12 deals closed by the unit so far, she has been involved in two.
In 2017 alone, the venture unit, which works across all lines of business in insurance and reinsurance including life, non-life, specialties and health, completed six new investments, including four as lead investor. These were Slice Labs, Augury, WePredict, Next Insurance, Trov and Boughtbymany. At the time of writing, it was looking to close a seventh investment by year-end.
Looking ahead, Dingreville said she hoped to contribute to encouraging innovation within the insurance and reinsurance spaces, and to bring the best VC practices to insurance CVC, with goals of offering better products to customers accelerating the benefits for key stakeholders.
A graduate of Telecom ParisTech, Dingreville is also an occasional lecturer at the equally prestigious Ecole Polytechnique and HEC Paris.
In her free time, she is a very keen dancer: once part of an amateur modern jazz company, she still sees dance as her “best stress relief and a way for her to free her mind”.