Paris, October 12, 2023 – Hi Inov – Dentressangle, the Franco-German venture capital company, is celebrating its 10th anniversary by announcing the first closing of its third venture capital fund, which raised €75 million. The firm is now targeting €150 million.
Based in Paris and Munich, Hi Inov announces a first closing of €75 million for the Hi Inov 3 fund. The company has now passed its first milestone, thanks to the support of its historic investors and a new, more international investor base made up of institutional investors, family investment holding companies and entrepreneurs.
A €150 million target for Hi Inov 3
Hi Inov is now planning to raise a total of €150 million. The Hi Inov 3 fund will invest between €2 million and €6 million, and up to €15 million in Series A and B investments. It is targeting six sectors in particular:
- SaaS application software
- PaaS software, no code/low code solutions
- Cloud infrastructure software, DevOps
- Artificial intelligence, data
- Collaborative tools, new working modes
- Climate tech
A new feature of this SFDR 8-rated third fund is that Hi Inov has committed itself to an approach based on educational and technical support for its portfolio, in order to reduce the carbon footprint of digital applications in development. This ambitious objective involves implementing the best development practices, from the choice of technical architecture to that of an energy-efficient cloud provider.
A first investment in German HR start-up Kenjo
With this first closing, Hi Inov has just led its first Series A round of €8.8 million to the German HR software start-up Kenjo. Made by the Munich team, this investment illustrates the success of Hi Inov’s presence in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and in Benelux, where the company has already made 8 investments since opening its German office in 2019.
Over €320m under management and 38 start-ups supported in 10 years
Co-founded in 2013 by Pierre-Henri Dentressangle and Valérie Gombart, Hi Inov’s original ambition was to build up a portfolio of innovative B2B digital tech start-ups, with the aim of acting as a reference investor in their development and thus becoming world leaders in their category. A decade later, the results are very promising. Hi Inov has helped the emergence of leaders such as Deepki, Platform.sh and 360 Learning, 3 flagship French Tech scale-ups listed in the prestigious French Next 40 and Next 120 index, and Ninox, the Berlin-based leader in no-code PaaS for the industry.
Over the past 10 years, Hi Inov has acquired thirty-eight European companies and now has €320m of capital under management. The company, which has already completed 14 exits, delivers above-standard returns on investment, in the top quartile of Venture Capital, with a gross portfolio multiple of X3, and a DPI of 1.5 X over the first few years of operation.
To support its development and the launch of future funds, the Hi Inov team has grown from 12 to 16 employees this year.
Pierre-Henri Dentressangle, founder and chairman of Hi Inov, said: “The partnership we formed with Valérie Gombart in 2013 brought together our two visions of entrepreneur and investor, with the ambition of supporting B2B tech start-ups in their mission to digitalise businesses. We continue to fulfil this mission by supporting nearly forty European companies, all of them renowned and at the cutting edge of technology in their fields. We’re delighted to be able to build on this momentum with this latest round of funding, which will give us even greater resources and scope for action.”
“This successful first closing demonstrates our investors’ confidence in Hi Inov’s high-fashion, hyper-specialist model, which has made us so successful over the past decade. Thanks to the support of our LPs, and backed by a 16-strong team – which now includes 4 operating partners – Hi Inov intends to continue supporting its start-ups through its sustainable growth model,” commented Valérie Gombart, founder and CEO of Hi Inov.