Daphni secures $215M for its third fund

French VC Farm Duffy His new fund is announced to shut down Daffney Blue first. The farm has collected $ 200 million (about $ 215 million at the current exchange rate). It is expected to increase $ 250 million ($ 270 million) by the end of the year.

Some of the notable past investments of Duffnie include back market, swail, habsikle and passcollal. Overall, the firm has invested in 70 European startups since 2015.

With its latest funds, Daffney has planned to invest in 40 startups. Limited partners in Daffney Blue include Credit Mutuel Arakia, BPI France, European Investment Fund, Pro BTP and Swen Capital Partners.

Founder Partner Pierre-Eric Libovichi told me, “We need to ask ourselves how we can both separate ourselves and support technology or services that are durable when investing in new projects.”

“Because at the end of the day, there is a cycle and we can see that at a certain moment, the market is united, or it dominates by American players, or in the end, there was not enough progress to start.”

Although most VC companies refer to artificial intelligence in each other sentence, Duffney wants to emphasize science (greater) as the main reason for the next wave of innovation: life science, biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics.

“When you talk about quantum computing, well, quantum computing is the basic physics combined with hardware and software,” said Libovi. He also said that the big language models are the first and foremost of mathematics.

As a result, Daffney is hiring different profiles to join the team. For example, a PhD undergraduate and PhD students are in the investment squad.

“There is another ingredient here that is a new trend. Researchers are much more open to commercialization of their basic and enforceable research, as they see all the friends around them see the companies,” said Libovici.

When are French universities Set aside A part of their budget to attract American researchers, Daffney says it did not like to re -focus on basic science.

“This is a coincidence. We launched it long before this trend was,” said Libovisi. Of course, Daffney is exposed to American researchers who are starting a startup in Europe.

Next, Daffney has to be deployed to this newly -raised capital and prove that it has found a skilled investment strategy. “Raise is not the last in itself. An last of themselves is distributing the return, and therefore quit,” said Libovichi.