Non-dilutive royalty-based financing for European technology and life sciences SMEs and research organisations

BGV invest in deep tech startups in order to help them to become global companies anchored in Silicon Valley. Project are sourced from Silicon Valley, Israel, Western Europe and India. I am helping with sourcing and due diligence for any digital project.

Sereema delivers its digital & IoT expertise to boost wind farm performance, detect optimization opportunities on wind turbines resulting in a significant increase in revenues.

1st digital support program for employees who work shifted hours to get a good night's sleep, Shifters helps people to better cope with their staggered working hours.

Clardian develops software tools to ensure that its customers easily comply with ethical, transparency and data confidentiality requirements in a complex regulatory environment.

As deputy CEO, I am in charge of Afone Participations' innovation and investment strategy, both in France and abroad. The subject areas are related to the group's historical activities in telecommunications, electronic payment and financial services more generally. This strategy is based on the development of new services, as well as investments in deep tech start-ups in the areas of blockchain, fintech and more generally digital technologies. Afone Participations is listed on the Paris market (EURONEXT / AFO). Its 2017 turnover was € 41.8 million.

Zissmo is a peer-to-peer platform designed to connect startups and investors around the world. The target is to build the biggest database of startups that will allow them to find investment opportunities in every continent through a fully charged dashboard with filters, reports, and data analytics tools. The most comprehensive business profile, ready to be scouted by investors, plus a suite of acceleration resources to speed up this process.

My mission as advisor of the Chaiman is to help build Inria's new partnerships in the field of innovation, the creation of start-ups and, in particular, in means of financing innovation.Some examples:- I am involved in setting up the next fund start-up in the field of digital "deep tech", which will take over from IT- Translation, implemented in 2011 and whose investment period will end in the spring 2019.- I am setting up a consortium of innovation specialists in order to help projects coming from research in transforming into real start-up projects ready to raise money from VCs.

Inria, the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics, promotes “scientific excellence for technology transfer and society”. Graduates from the world’s top universities, Inria's 2,400 employees rise to the challenges of digital sciences. With its open, agile model, Inria is able to explore original approaches with its partners in industry and academia and provide an efficient response to the multidisciplinary and application challenges of the digital transformation. Inria is the source of many innovations that add value and create jobs. I was in charge of the coordination of all the activities of technological development, transfer and innovation, start-up creation and industrial partnerships within the institute. Some of my tasks and achievements, as examples: - Promotion of the Inria Carnot Institute, which is a label of the most successful research institutes in developing their partnerships with industry. - Implementation of the InriaHub scheme which invests € 5.5m each year in the development technology and maturation of transfer projects - Implementation of the entrepreneurship awareness program, Horizon Start-up - Implementation of the program to support the creation of a Digital Start-Up business (9 month program) - Creation of the Inria Foundation - Establishment of InriaSoft, a dedicated program to develop consortiums of companies and academics in order to support and promote large software developed by Inria research teams

As a worldwide leader of Internet deployment, it was in September 1986 that Inria started the management of the ".fr" domain. In 1997, the volume of activities and services expanding and, above all, beyond the scope of research, a spinoff was created by Inria. I represent Inria and therefore the interests of research in IT, on the board of directors of this structure alongside representatives other major users.

The 14 SATT (Technology Transfer Acceleration Company - in French "Société d'Accélération du Transfert Technologique") are dedicated companies that have the mission to promote the maturation and transfer of technologies from the research laboratories of its shareholders. They are initially founded which public money but they have to develop licensing activities and technology development to fill the gap between research and society. Inria, via its Paris-Saclay research center, participates in SATT Paris-Saclay (Inria is a share holder of this company). The board decides on all the classic acts of monitoring a company, but also on investment decisions in projects. As a member of the board, I am specifically involved in the evaluation of projects and in the final funding decision of these projects.

Inria Participations is Inria's private law subsidiary whose mission is the management of equity investments other structures, mainly investment funds or start-up companies launched after results of the research work of the institute.

The CURIE network brings together specialists of the technology transfer community in France. It's a place of exchange and construction of good practices in this fundamental area to ensure maximum impact on research results.

The Inria Foundation provides funding for operations to support Inria's research activities. I built this foundation and I managed all the operations during the launch phase. In particular, The Inria Foundation helped to build support for InriaSoft, a dedicated program to support and promote major software produced by research teams of Inria.

Inria is a Carnot institute since 2013, renewed in 2017. The association of the Carnot institute allows an exchange and a coordination of actions between the different Carnot institutes.

Tutor Group's mission is to implement optical fiber networks in non-dense areas (typically rural or semi-rural zones). Deployments are carried out within the framework of public service delegations. COVAGE has bought Tutor at the end of 2016. I developed, within Tutor, the study mechanisms of networks to quickly build realistic and competitive price offers, I developed the Europe Essone network and management of the SEQUANTIC network (professional optical fibers in Ile-de-France).

I built the business model and the SATT LUTECH application file, a project leaded by the Sorbonne University (former Pierre and Marie Curie university). This SATT was one of the first that was labeled by the French government.

The Afone Group is developing activities around telecommunications and integration into vertical applications of these tools. In this company, as technical director, I have set up a nationwide mobile phone network on behalf of the Leclerc retail group. This mobile phone network has been developed as an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) from SFR. It is still operational and marketed by Leclerc under the name RegloMobile. In 2008, I was appointed Deputy Chief Executive Officer of AFONE in charge of electronic payment systems for companies. In this position, I contributed to develop technical and commercial offers. I also take part in the setting up of a payment institution (European regulation SEPA) which allowed AFONE to exploit the whole value chain from the electronic payment terminal (for credit cards, VISA, MASTERCARD, AMEX, etc.) to financial clearing services, via telecommunication networks.

QOSMOS was created in 2000. It is a start-up resulting from the research work I carried out with one of my PhD students. The technology and products developed by QOSMOS are at the basis of deep packet inspection technologies. I raised the first funds (2 M€) from SOFINNOVA and I contributed to the technical and commercial development in the telecommunications sector. I also participated in the following fundraisers for an approximate total of 13 M€. The business area of ​​the company has evolved and I left the company in 2007. QOSMOS was bought in 2016 by the Swedish group ENEA.

The laboratory was officially created on 1 January 1997 as a merger of four Computer Science laboratory of the CNRS - the biggest research agency in France. The LIP6 was then born as a dedicated research unit of the CNRS ()UMR 7606). Alongside Prof. Jean- François Perrot, I was part, as deputy director, of the management team. I was then elected to the head of the LIP6 laboratory in 2001. The management of this laboratory of 500 people was an exciting time. The construction of a research unit with its own culture, setting up complementary teams, defining a policy were the key points of this period.At the end of my term, the laboratory had financial resources coming from external research contracts for a little more than 50% of its budget, thereby guaranteeing a balance between basic research and areas of practical application. A patenting policy has been initiated. Finally, I started the work of building common research teams with Inria, by throwing the foundations of the first Inria-UPMC joint research team. This was a tough task at this time, but, today, the cooperation between Inria and UPMC is numerous, strong and fruitful.

I was appointed as full university professor in 1989 at Paris-Sorbonne University (former Pierre et Marie Curie University).