In 2015, Antoine and Olivier, 2 long-time friends and co-founders of the marketplace NaturaBuy, created Kerala Ventures. Their vision: reinvent the early stage investment building exceptional ventures from scratch with passionate and ultra ambitious founders. They were joined by Marc Laurent, previously working with Antoine at Otium.
Kerala Ventures was based on the concept of “cofounding investor”. This concept relies on three pillars : an ultra early stage investment strategy (mainly at the inception of startups), a massive and unmatched operational support and an highly selective investment strategy, with a maximum of 3 investments per year.
In January 2014, Antoine, Olivier and Marc partnered with Stanislas Niox-Château (Antoine and Stan had previously worked together at Otium for 4 years), Ivan Schneider and Jessy Bernal. At that time, Doctolib had no revenue, no clients, and was starting last on the market : 7 direct competitors were already launched… It was a formidable challenge and everything was left to be built!
Doctolib is now an iconic unicorn of the French tech. It is the #1 healthcare startup in Europe, with 150,000 installed doctors and more than 300M€ of VC capital raised, 2,000 employees and 70m patients accounts in France, Italy and Germany. Since 2013, Kerala has been massively involved in Doctolib operations, strategy and financing. Above all, focus was set up on people, Kerala was acting as a dedicated support hiring team executing 25 hirings for the startup over the past 6 years...
For Malt as well, Kerala acted as “founding investor” backing Vincent Huguet et Hugo Lassiège as they had 0 revenue. We have been directly involved in supporting recruitment, product strategy and first fundraising rounds (ISAI then Serena and IDinvest) with the founders.
Since then, Malt has became an open and powerful marketplace connecting freelancers to thousands of corporates. They raised a Series D (total funding of 105M€) in 2021. Malt operates in 3 markets, employs 300 salaries and manages 15M€ monthly transactions.
Following the 2 first operations Doctolib and Malt, Kerala partnered with Pierre-Emmanuel Bercegeay and Victor Sebag in April 2016 as they were launching Ouihelp (first client signed in July 2016). Ouihelp rethinks senior care services through a combination of top quality service and technology. Today, the start up operates in the top 25 French urban areas helping more than 1,500 seniors to live at home in the best conditions.
Then Kerala was strongly involve at the earliest stages in Skillup, HR SaaS for management training and Privateaser, online booking marketplace for B2C and B2B events. Both of them later raised significant amounts of capital and reached leading positions on their respective markets.
The Kerala team, completed from 2019 by Samuel Lenoble joining as CFO, also backed startups that had already their very first clients (generally a few thousands of € per month, at a “pre Seed” stage): Admo.tv, Tracktor, Hostnfly, Avrio, Adot (bought by Veepee), PlayPlay, Indy, Napta and more recently Sonnar.
Kerala is 100% involved and enthusiast to massively back those outstanding team in the long term!
