Orange announced that Orange Ventures, its venture capital arm, has become a separate legal entity with an increased allocation of €350M, enabling it to be more flexible and competitive in searching for and supporting the best start-up talent globally.
Orange Ventures invests in high-growth industries with Orange’s conventional experience in fields such as networking, cybersecurity, digital business and creative financial services, as well as in emerging areas such as e-health that the company is exploring.
Orange Ventures, with offices in Paris and Dakar, supports start-ups at all maturity levels, from start-ups in Africa and the Middle East to more developed companies in Europe and the United States, with investment tickets of up to €20M per funding round.
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For Orange, the aim of Orange Initiatives is to encourage the development of future technology pioneers who, by sharing their innovation capabilities with their 256 million customers around the world, facilitate the transition to an increasingly digital and responsible world, at the service of all. To accomplish this, Orange Ventures differentiates between Orange and start-ups by proposing a highly organized framework to discover and build versatile and optional synergies.
Jérôme Berger, President and Managing Partner of Orange Projects, states: “our wish is to constitute an organisation which combines the best of both worlds: Orange’s business expertise as well as the agility of decision-making and the quality of the financial monitoring of the best investment funds. We closely support each start-up post-investment in order to contribute to its development and facilitate its direct and structured access to the Orange ecosystem whenever it is relevant.”
Orange Ventures seeks to achieve the financial success of the best venture capital investment firms and will independently make the investment decisions. Thus, with proven experts from the venture capital industry, the Orange Ventures team, made up of twenty individuals, has been expanded and will also take over the management of the Orange Digital Ventures initiative portfolio that was launched in 2015.
Original article on Tech Gist Africa