Jolt Capital

If we were boxers, we'd go for patient jabs rather than quick right hooks. If we were fencers, we'd favour the repeated little cuts over bold thrusts. Jean Schmitt was on tv this morning, explaining why deeptech for us at Jolt Capital is not about the first big blows and cuts (Rod was wrong). That's why the jury's still out regarding the most overhyped emerging techs. That's why we'll keep calmly applying the same rulebook to choose and grow our investments. Deeptech is sometimes more about tactical rupturing than hurried disruption. Depth by a thousand cuts (Taylor should have changed the title of her song too, just by one letter) will be guiding us when we start investing our new vintage Jolt Capital V, whose first closing at €600m has just been announced. (Replay on BFM Business' "Good Morning Business" show with Erwan MORICE and Anthony Morel) #rodstewart #taylorswift #deeptech #privateequity #patience #stamina #growth

The same reason that explains why AndreessenhorowitZ is known as a16z (*) would also work for the stator-rotor (**) duet ArnouldpereZ, the machinists in charge of sales & marketing at Jolt Capital. Decimal for the French, hexadecimal for the Americans (you guys always do things bigger). Hey, Marc and Ben, if you happen to be in the City of Lights one of these days, come knock on our door, we'll talk deeptech investment over a red mullet ceviche and a shot of aguardiente at one of Arbelaez (you know, a6z) Colombian joints here. (*) the author of this post didn't even know that there's a word for this (it's called a numeronym) (**) https://lnkd.in/dqPiUQnv #a10z #a16z #saturdaypost #deeptech #privateequity #salesandmarketing #numeronym Andreessen Horowitz Juan Arbelaez Eric Arnould Philippe Perez Ben Horowitz

At any given time there is always a couple of #Joltians traveling to spread the word. In the past few days: 📌 Laurent wrapped up the #Ascend conference in Copenhagen, on stage with (among others) Jean-David Malo to discuss the singular European path to prosperity through innovation. 📌 Meriem debated at the Private Equity Insights event in London "the GP stakes revolution" with (among others) Catherine Haumesser. 📌 Pierre shared his knowledge on silicon photonics at the maiden Pava x Yole Group Deep Dive in Munich, an industrial domain in which Europe could lead the pack. 📌 Eric toured Seoul with Warren to meet a significant number of South Korean LPs, including the one that has already subscribed to Jolt Capital V. 📌 Escorted by two of our Italian senior team members (Giacomo and Andrea), Jean made a stop in Milan, on his way to Finland, to join the "Europe is going Italian" CDP Cassa Depositi e Prestiti Conference. We should definitely enforce the Japanese お土産 tradition at Jolt. And we should really have a Polaroids corkboard at the office. #omiyage #travel #conference #team #speaker #privateequity #growthcapital #investment #gpstake #gp #lp #deeptech #scaleup #innovation #techtransfer #polaroid #gospel

Sept. '25: Jolt Capital V's anchor investment was disclosed, a €260 million commitment from European Investment Fund (EIF) with support from ETCI. Nov. '25: the next nested layer around that cornerstone gets announced today, with a first formal closing at €600 million. Sometime in '26: we'll put the final touch to the outermost envelope, revealing the ultimate amount raised for Jolt Capital V, a dyed-in-the-wool growth deeptech fund with a hard cap set at €1.1 billion. 💯+💯+💯+💯+💯+💯 🙌🏼 Our gratitude to all the new and former LPs who subscribed to this first closing, and looking forward to those currently in the antechamber, getting ready for the second closing. Special pat on the back of our valiant team of pickers and gleaners (Eric & Zineb in 🇫🇷, Meriem in 🇬🇧, Clement in 🇨🇦, Akira in 🇯🇵, Warren in 🇰🇷), of our gem of a CFO who knows so well how to structure this new harvest (Giacomo in 🇮🇹), and finally of our unflinching choir master (well, you-know-who). Many thanks also to the team of legal counsels at Goodwin Procter in Paris, led by Sarah Michel. The full press release is available, as always, on our website. #jolt #joltian #fund #vintage #fundraising #closing #investment #investing #growthPE #privateequity #growth #anchor #cornerstone #drypowder #hardcap #deeptech #investmentthesis #rhino #european

Some restaurants are fond of celebrity walls. Chez Laurent, the French Mâchon Lyonnais in Seoul, has one. You can see part of it behind our dear partners at Korea Venture Investment Corporation (Inhae Bae and Wonseok Kang) during last night's dinner with #Joltians Eric Arnould and Warren Kim (김원기). But look closer at the one at the bottom. What if you suddenly realized that the group picture you've just taken ... was already there on the wall? Those infinite loop paradoxes remind us about some of the best Christopher Nolan movies. Time twists. The limits of physics. Entropy reversal. One-electron universe. Interesting topics for a dinner discussion about the future of deeptech. Thanks again to KVIC for their investment in Jolt Capital V, and to IBK Securities for facilitating Eric and Warren's ongoing fundraising roadshow. And if you haven't seen Tenet, go watch it! #fund #fundraising #korea #southkorea #deeptech #investment #privateequity #GP #LP #closing #drypowder #investorrelations #movie #christophernolan #physics #time #timetravel #paradox

It's not because you have a thousand eyes that you can spot something that vibrates outside the visible spectrum. Most innovative companies of a certain size start pinging on investors' radars when they've already raised VC/PE capital. But what if they haven't? Here comes our AI hunting dog. #JoltNinja not only has thousands of eyes, it also operates within a wider range of wavelengths, allowing us to access what we call the "hidden universe". This pool of stealth companies is also ripe with potential investments for us. 52% of all European companies in medical devices belong to the hidden universe. 71% in semicon capital equipment. 44% in quantum technologies. To feed the pipeline of our new Jolt Capital V fund, we'll leave no stone unturned. [The legendary Shangri La used to spur the imagination of explorers. Today, even the remotest yurt in the Tibetan Kunlun Mountains can be monitored from surveillance satellites. Far less romantic but fiendishly efficient.] #deeptech #investment #fund #investing #privateequity #growthcapital #blackmatter #AI #ML #NLP #fundinground #stealth #vc #pe #venturecapital #monitoring #pipeline #deal

Because valuing a cow or a piece of cultivated land is based on proven and sensible rules, because there's no room for futile and ephemeral products, because farming is also an art at the crossing of several techniques, because we both have to deal with the unforgivingness of nature and the hard laws of science, because trees don't grow to the sky and measured growth is a very virtuous thing indeed, because losing even one cow or one participation is painful, because meaningful things don't grow in a void and attachement to the home ground is essential. At Jolt Capital, we often say that we follow "the way of the peasant", and this is not hot air. 👨🏼🌾🐄🌳🚜 #thewayofthepeasant #cowsbeatunicorns #joltian #deeptech #privateequity #values #growth

Yes, this post has (everything) to do with private equity. In July 1979, French pro cyclist Bernard Hinault wins both final stages of Tour de France. He didn't have to, he could have prudently stayed in the peloton and secured the final victory. But the prudent man rule is sometimes the riskier. Crashes are more likely when you ride with the pack. The same month, the US Labor Department made it clear that the Employee Retirement Income Safety Act (ERISA) "was not intended to discourage the investment of private pension funds in small or new businesses or other less‐traditional ventures". In other words that the "prudent man rule" should not discourage pension funds to invest part of their assets in venture capital, that diversification was an inalienable part of prudential investment behavior. As a result, American VC/PE industry took off in the 80s, surging tenfold in a few years, with pension funds representing about half of all contributions. It's often imprudent not to take enough risks. What are European pension funds waiting for? 🇪🇺 🚴🏼 💪🏼 #investment #fund #venturecapital #privateequity #investing #pensionfund #risk #prudent #fiduciary #deeptech #european #regulation #procycling #tourdefrance

Says who? Say the #Joltians. Influential. Creative. Energetic. Contrarian. Far-reaching. Unflinching. Spot-on. Nine reasons why we feel close to Mariana Mazzucato: 1️⃣ she totally debunked the core myth of Silicon Valley, showing how important public money and defence contracts were (and still are, right Mr. Musk?) 2️⃣ some over-used fuzzy concepts need to be re-charged and re-complexified (from ecosystems to public-private partnerships) 3️⃣ her dead poet society's style of teaching is enchanting 4️⃣ she has worked on the Chips Act and has proposed distributive safeguards to it 5️⃣ she dares to say when the king has no clothes 6️⃣ we should start with grand challenges, turn them into clear missions, and then only unleash the innovation machine in a symbiotic public-private dance 7️⃣ smart public procurement is absolutely essential 8️⃣ she is fiercely against technological kleptocracy, with a few tech lords privatizing common goods that have been patiently assembled by larger communities (look what's unfolding with AI at the moment) 9️⃣ consultants have weakened businesses, infantilized governments and warped our economies (those are her words) Her books are really uplifting. Don't hesitate to offer them for Christmas. And if you read this post, dear Mariana, we'd love to have you as a keynote speaker at one of our next events at the Château de Versailles. #economist #commongood #commons #publicprivatepartnership #public #siliconvalley #myth #economics #missiondriven #privateequity #deeptech UCL UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) JEDI ⚡️ Joint European Disruptive Initiative

Feynman was right, there's plenty of space "at the bottom". Our world increasingly relies on the ability to master the flow of electrons and the trajectories of photons. Which, in turn, hinges on the art of chiseling, etching, structuring, nicking, grooving, sculpting materials at nanoscale. At Jolt Capital we have a passion for this region of the deeptech galaxy (that's probably why we've always made money in semiconductors and photonics), from EDA to capital equipment, from IP block design to metrology sensors. Jean recently joined Regis Hamelin CTO at BLUMORPHO and coordinator of the aCCCess project, to talk about Europe's best options in the realm of semiconductors. Why Jolt Capital invests a third of its dry powder in it. Under which conditions pilot lines can deliver. How to assess the most strategic domains for patenting. How come so few semicon startups use AI and so many of them fly under the radar of VC/PE. Check out the replay on Blumorpho's Youtube channel. And next time you have a chance to talk to Jean on visio, if he is in his office, you'll notice something behind him. Just like the mesmerizing metallic blue of the buttefly's wings comes from geometry, not chemistry, the eerily patterned landscape on the enlargement is a NIL Technology nano-imprinted metalens that can manipulate incoming light in the most amazing ways. 🦋 #deeptech #semicon #semiconductor #chips #microelectronics #wafer #silicon #photonics #metalens #metaoptics #nano #nanoscale #gpu #privateequity #joltninja #scaleup #investment #pilotline #manufacturing #light #color