Investor Spotlight: HCVC Partner Alexis Houssou

Chris O'Brien -

What: HCVC closed its second fund at $75 million versus an initial target of $60 million.

"That's going to allow us to invest in more companies but also potentially invest with larger checks," said HCVC Partner and co-founder Alexis Houssou. "That's because I think we're in an environment where companies need to be funded for longer. Given that we're still in the middle or at the end of what was a rough couple of years for venture capital, we're very excited."

HCVC now has $130 million in assets under management. Fund II will make 40 investments or about 10 per year.

Number of Investments: More than 50 globally.

Size of Investments: Pre-seed and seed, primarily in Europe and North America, with checks ranging from €250,000 to €2.5 million.

What's notable: HCVC started as the Hardware Club, a community for hardware founders. Hardware Club now has 600 companies in 50 countries and helps founders develop their ideas and connect with potential partners such as manufacturing, distribution, and retail.

Inside Hardware Club’s community-driven approach to venture capital and building startups
Feature VentureBeat presents: AI Unleashed - An exclusive executive event for enterprise data leaders. Network and learn with industry peers. Learn More As Barbara Belvisi and Alexis Houssou were working with hardware startups about three years ago, the pair of venture capitalists noticed again and…
VentureBeatChris O’Brien

In parallel, Houssou launched a $50 million venture fund in late 2018. He was joined by partners Jerry Yang and Aymerik Renard.

Hardware Club expands size of first fund to $50 million
Hardware Club has increased the size of its first investment fund to $50 million as the community-driven platform expands its early-stage investing.
VentureBeatChris O’Brien

HCVC has now added a fourth partner, Alex Flamant, who was previously a VC at Notion Capital and Kindred Capital in London. Flamant specializes in AI and worked at IBM Watson before becoming a VC.

The HCVC team

Focus: The firm invests around themes related to what it calls "hard tech": Climate, Defense, AI infrastructure, Robotics, Techbio, and Space.

Notable investments:

Span

Caper (acquired by Instacart)

Automata

Cowboy

And from Fund II:

Radian

Augmenta (acquired by CNH Industrial).

Renaissance Fusion

Antaris

Ark Biotech

Transmutex

Sarcura

What they bring to the table: The new Fund is backed by such institutional investors as the European Investment Fund, Isomer Capital and Molten Ventures. In addition, the fund's LPs Albert Wenger (USV), John Elkann (Chairman of Stellantis and Ferrari) and Toto Wolff (Mercedes F1 AMG).