Orange Ventures has become a separate legal entity from its Orange parent and entered into the top ten corporate venture capital funds in Europe through increased funding.

Orange has been given an increased allocation of €350 million, “empowering” it to be more “agile and competitive” in seeking out and supporting start-up talent worldwide, said Orange.

The Ventures business invests in high-growth sectors in areas traditional to Orange expertise such as connectivity, cyber security, digital transformation and new financial services, as well as new markets that the group is exploring like e-health.

With offices in Paris and Dakar, Senegal, Orange Ventures supports start-ups at all stages of maturity with investment tickets up to €20 million per financing round.

The Orange Ventures team, made up of 20 people, has been strengthened with established experts from the venture capital industry and will now take over the management of the portfolio of the Orange Digital Ventures initiative launched in 2015.

Jérôme Berger, president and managing partner of Orange Ventures, said: “We want 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 financial monitoring of the best investment funds.”

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