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Qui veut un stage de rêve chez Kima Ventures ? (Janvier 2025)
Talks about Kima Ventures, Xavier Niel and start-up investments
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Alexis Robert
Partner at Kima Ventures
Greater Paris Metropolitan Region
Overview
Alexis Robert is a Partner at Kima Ventures, specializing in investments in Series A and Seed stages in sectors like Payments, Security, Insurance, AI, and SaaS. With a background in entrepreneurship and project management, Alexis has co-founded ShowMango and held leadership roles at MyBee S.A.S., showcasing a strong track record of successful investments in companies like Tulyp, Palette, and Purchasely.
Work Experience
General Partner
2015 - Current
Kima Ventures is the venture capital arm of Xavier Niel. We're one of the world's most active early-stage investors, backing 100 companies a year, 150k checks in average, mostly French founders in tech, all over the world. We're super reactive. No BS. A portfolio of now 1000+ companies. Invested in Sorare (co-led pre-seed), Alma (pre-seed), Pigment (seed), Pennylane (seed), Agicap (seed), Ledger (series A), and many more ...
Co-founder
2013 - 2015
- Launched 1 pivot every 2 months for 18 months — 100% functioning products, all failed. No PMF, no retention, pure struggle. - We harassed VCs in London, to the point they changed sidewalks when they saw us. Nearly went personally bankrupt, had no money for food, almost slept in a park. - We raised $250K from event industry experts and got backed by Seedcamp. - Pivoted to ShowMango (Netflix for events), finally got PMF, hit 10K MRR, but pivoting burned all our cash and we had to close. This lasted 6 months. - I applied to Kima Ventures with £2 in my bank account.
CTO
2011 - 2013
MyBee (now known as PayinTech) was the first cashless payment provider for the festival industry. There was no NFC smartphone at the time, so I've built our own hardware :) The company raised $6.5M in total, and got acquired by Merim Group. - I built the fleet of 45 NFC 3G payment terminals from scratch, developed the software (C++/Python), the firmware (FreeRTOS on STM32F4), designed the hardware (PCB with KiCad), developed the back office & fleet-management software as well as supervised the supply chain, in a matter of a few months. The terminals have been successfully used in 50-100+ events, from high-end corporate events to remote festivals. - Designed and implemented ephemeral networks with high reliability in complex environments such as campaign outdoors, harbor areas, basements or mountains by combining 3G, WiFi, Ethernet and custom 868MHz RF links. - Led the technical operations for the access control and payment systems on more than 30 events, achieving 20K simultaneous users at peak with 99% reliability and ~$5M TPV, resistant to spotty on-site connectivity conditions. (The video below was filmed the day of the big Orange HLR breakdown in France in July 2012, we had only Orange M2M SIM cards, and we managed to make the event work anyway ;) )
President
2012 - 2013
Student ISP which provides Internet access to the student halls of TELECOM ParisTech, 400 subscribers. We deployed IPv6 (I patched squid to enable transparent IPv6 proxying through IPv6-NAT), and deployed the first FreeRADIUS instance for an alpha release of WPA-Enterprise WiFi access for our subscribers. Squid patch : https://www.squid-cache.org/mail-archive/squid-dev/201306/0137.html
Summer of Code in Space — Software Engineer
2011 - 2011
The Orekit project wanted to test the feasibility of using standard tablets for spatial dynamics tasks, with a long-term goal of enabling satellite orbit control stations to be controlled remotely to save costs. As part of the Summer of Code in Space, I ported the Orekit framework to Android, worked with the Apache Common Math project to fix some speed issues with DalvikVM, and developed a proof of concept Android application to carry out basic spatial dynamics tasks.
Software Engineer
2008 - 2008
Designed and programmed the continuous deployment solution for all the Hachette Livre's group web applications. Introduced subversion at Hachette Livre (that was using only CVS at the time). Designed and programmed a prototype of a new SSO authentication platform for the Hachette Livre's group internal applications. Had to patch PHP to go around the quirks of Novell's LDAP to change passwords. And various tasks like updating an internal open-source ticketing system, building a JNI wrapper for Win32 dialup modem libraries, fixing frontend issues on Hachette Livre's group website ... I was 18 at the time.
Software Engineer
2006 - 2006
Built an internal ERP system for an SMB making innovating beauty products : invoices / quotes / packing lists, order tracking, customer base management, inventory management, and factory management. Using CakePHP :) I was 16 at the time.
Education
Master of Science (MS)
2011 - 2015
MPSI/MP*
2008 - 2011