The EY French Venture Capital Barometer identifies financing operations in equity of companies in their creation phase or during their first years after creation, from 1st of January to 31st of December 2015, published before the 14th of January 2016.

1. EY French
Venture Capital
Barometer
#EYBaroVC
Annual results 2015

2. EY French Venture Capital Barometer ……………….……………………………………………………………………… Annual results 2015
Franck Sebag
EY partner in charge of the VC-IPO sector in France
What a year! With nearly €2bn in funds raised in France in 2015,
investments in French start-ups have passed a new milestone and
confounded even the most optimistic forecasts, reaching €1.809bn
in a total of 484 deals. The year certainly got off to a flying start:
funds raised in the first half of the year (€759m, 244 deals)
virtually equaled the total amount of funds raised in the whole of
2014 (€897m, 372 deals). France remains third in the European
rankings, behind the UK and Germany, in terms of total funds
raised.
Following on from an excellent crop in 2014, another new milestone
was passed this year in terms of deal size, with two fundraisings of
over €100m. Average ticket size has also risen, up to €3.7m from
€3.1m in 2014, and a large number of transactions surpassed the
€10m mark. These large tickets were mainly in the Internet services
sector. BlaBlaCar, which stood out last year with a record $100m
(€73m) fundraising, topped the charts again in 2015 with a
spectacular €177m fundraising that earned a congratulatory tweet
from the Minister of the Economy: “Welcome to the (very) big time.
And bravo!” Valued at $1.6bn, the start-up has joined the elite club
of the world’s 147 unicorns. Congratulations are also in order for
the €100m fundraising by Toulouse-based start-up Sigfox, a
telecoms operator specializing in connected objects, which may
herald another entry into the exclusive club of French unicorns.
Unseen since the 2000s, these spectacular figures will prompt
Cassandras to see the specter of a new bull market haunting
internet and tech stocks. While such a reading is understandable if
you confine yourself to looking at the similarity in the numbers
between 2000 and 2015, it deserves to be nuanced in the light of
the totally different fundamentals. First, the entry barrier
represented by launch costs has been lifted: whereas in 1995
entrepreneurs needed seed capital of $5m, open source
technologies and reduced storage costs have reduced the amount
since then considerably, to around $5,000 in 2014.
Second, the digital and technological maturity of users
means that start-ups can be “born global”, with immediate
access to a global market with critical mass. Third, we should
bear in mind that the appetite for new services among
consumers such as ourselves has never been keener than it is
today.
While they broke records in 2015, these figures also
represent a profound transformation at a time when our
economic cycle and economic models are changing. The
whole financing industry exists to meet this challenge and
has proved its efficiency, as the unprecedented dynamism of
French entrepreneurship shows, but there is an urgent need
to shift up another gear. Although the number of start-ups in
the Greater Paris region, at some 12,000 of which 4,000 are
in the city itself, outstrips London or Berlin, France boasts
only a single unicorn and thus ranks only fifth on the list of
39 unicorns in the EMEIA region, behind the UK, Sweden,
Germany and Russia.
However, it is when you look beyond this European
benchmark across the Atlantic that the urgency of the need
to mobilize funding the power and raise more French
unicorns can be grasped: the flexible Nasdaq-quoted
champions of the new economy are terrifyingly young, while
the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) are on
average less than 30 years old; our CAC 40, with an average
age of 101, looks positively geriatric by comparison. Let’s
make a bet that the last three years of uninterrupted
exponential growth in French venture capital can put us back
on an upward economic trajectory and push our start-ups to
follow in the footsteps of the young giants like Alphabet,
which now boasts the highest market capitalization in the
world.
“France, the country that creates start-ups nonstop!” Capital, 09/06/2015

3. 2013 2014 2015
Data
€ 1.809bn of funds raised, 484 deals
Average per deal : €3.7m
#EYBaroVC
€973m
386 deals
€897m
372 deals
€1.809bn
484 deals
EY French Venture Capital Barometer ……………….……………………………………………………………………… Annual results 2015

4. Investments by sector
#EYBaroVC
Internet services
dominate the
rankings
In 2015, the biggest tickets
were concentrated mainly in
Internet services, which thus
retakes first place among the top
five sectors after ceding it
temporarily to Technology in the
first half of the year. One third of
the year’s invested funds –
€609m – went into Internet
services in 2015, almost double
the €347m figure for the
previous year.
The FinTech sector, whose debut
in the top five in the first half of
2015 attracted a lot of
attention, held onto fifth place,
raising €79m of funds in a total
of 16 deals.
EY French Venture Capital Barometer ……………….……………………………………………………………………… Annual results 2015

5. Investments by maturity stage :
2015
Total investments Average amount invested
2014
Total investments Average amount invested
#EYBaroVC
EY French Venture Capital Barometer ……………….……………………………………………………………………… Annual results 2015

6. Top 5 investments
#EYBaroVC
EY French Venture Capital Barometer ……………….……………………………………………………………………… Annual results 2015

7. Interview
Sébastien Fabre
Founder, Chairman & CEO, Vestiaire Collective
Founded in 2009, Vestiaire Collective is a peer-to-peer platform for the buying and selling of pre-owned luxury and designer
fashion. The company completed a €33m fundraising in September. We look back on one of the year’s top five fundraisings,
which was led by new equity investor Eurazeo Croissance together with previous investors Idinvest Partners, Balderton Capital,
Condé Nast and Ventech.
1) Your €33m fundraising was one of France’s five biggest
fundraisings in 2015. How did it go ?
It went very well! We’ve entered into an extreme growth phase with
a mature, established business model, and in those conditions it is
inevitably easier to raise money. We’ve been lucky enough in every
round to be able to choose the type of investors we wanted to join
our board and add value. We wanted investors alongside us with an
entrepreneurial philosophy who would help us at each stage in our
development, rather than just demanding reports of our results.
2) Why did you raise so much ?
The early years of Vestiaire Collective were devoted to developing a
platform to enable us to have the broad range of high-quality items that
sets us apart from our competitors. In a small number of years, we have
succeeded in creating a real European marketplace across the 20 or so
countries that supply our platform, which sells to around 40 countries in
total.
Although we don’t yet turn a profit, this fundraising
will enable us not only to move toward overall
profitability at group level but also to continue
growing in Europe and then gradually tackle the
North American market, which is currently the
largest e-commerce market in the world. Our goal is
to become the world leader in the online sale of
pre-owned fashion products within the next three
years.
3) Investments in the collaborative economy
have multiplied in recent years. Why do think
that is ?
In general terms, you sense this fundamental trend
and that there has been a collective awakening in
favor of this collaborative, revolving sphere of the
economy. (…)
#EYBaroVC
EY French Venture Capital Barometer ……………….……………………………………………………………………… Annual results 2015

8. Interview
Sébastien Fabre
Founder, Chairman & CEO, Vestiaire Collective
question 3
All of us now look at the economy through different eyes, and
this type of platform has a strong business, social and
environmental dimension which may explain the current
eagerness of investors. If we look at our own example, there
was a genuine demand to put high-added value items that
were slumbering in our users’ closets back on the market. In a
sense, we have democratized luxury by making these
upmarket items accessible at reduced prices to a younger and
less well-off population.
4) How do you set yourselves apart from your
competitors when talking to investors ?
Investors appreciated that our approach respects the rules
of the fashion industry. By bringing reassurance and ethics
to the secondary market, we enable little-worn items from
previous seasons to gain a new lease of life while retaining
their high value. We have a unique model which is based on
three pillars. Upstream, our team of stylists selects articles
according to style and season. Downstream, every product
is carefully checked and authenticated by our team of
experts before being sent to the end purchaser.
Thirdly, we rapidly added a community dimension which enables
our four million fashion-loving users to talk to each other on the
platform.
5) 2015 was a record year in terms of investment,
especially in France. What’s your view of 2016 ?
I’m extremely confident ! In the six years since we founded
Vestiaire Collective, we’ve seen how things have evolved in
France and it’s for that reason that we carried out our most
recent financing round with a French fund. I remember that
saying that went, “We may not have oil in France but we have
ideas”: to my mind, it sums up the spirit of the “French
touch”. France is a real land of innovation and creativity, with
a strong entrepreneurial culture which is now recognized and
praised from all sides. So much so that French investors, who
used to be focused on seed capital, are now starting to
finance late stage ventures. We all have the potential to move
organically toward second place in Europe !
#EYBaroVC
EY French Venture Capital Barometer ……………….……………………………………………………………………… Annual results 2015

9. European perspective
Top 3 Countries for VC activity
With nearly €2bn raised, France
emphatically confirmed its
significance in the European
venture capital market in 2015.
It thus held on to second place
in Europe (behind the UK) in
terms of the number of deals
carried out, just ahead of its
rival Germany with which it
remains neck-and-neck.
#EYBaroVC
EY French Venture Capital Barometer ……………….……………………………………………………………………… Annual results 2015

10. Note on methodology :
The EY French Venture Capital Barometer surveys equity financing deals for start-ups and early-stage businesses
announced prior to January 14, 2016 with a deal date from January 1 to December 31, 2015.
The French data presented in the Barometer are based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource, CFNEWS and
Capital Finance. The European data are based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource and CB Insights.
These data have been processed and analyzed in accordance with the EY methodology by Ernst & Young et
Associés. This study only covers deals for which the amount was publicly announced.
The Internet services sector covers activities such as e-commerce, performance marketing (e.g. lead generation,
search engine optimization), geomarketing or mobile applications.
The life sciences sector covers the biotech and medtech industries.
#EYBaroVC
EY French Venture Capital Barometer ……………….……………………………………………………………………… Annual results 2015

11. Contacts
Franck SEBAG
EY partner in charge of the VC-IPO sector in France
@frsebag
Nadège Abdou-Brahim
Marketing
@nadege_AB
Bonnie Olivier
Media relations
@BonnieOlivier
#EYBaroVC
EY French Venture Capital Barometer ……………….……………………………………………………………………… Annual results 2015