Momentum Invest

The four founding partners — Alain Cochenet, Pierre le Tanneur, Tristan Parisot, and Arthur Bureau — collectively make investment decisions, supported by associate Olivier Guine who joined the partnership in October 2023. The firm does not publish a formal investment committee charter, but its website emphasizes the operational-complementarity of the partner group: Cochenet and Parisot bring large-cap PE structuring, le Tanneur contributes CEO-level operating experience, and Bureau adds Bpifrance-sourced small-cap expertise.

The firm sources through the partners' deep personal networks built over decades in French private equity and industry. Cochenet co-founded and presides over the INSEAD Finance & Private Equity Club in France; le Tanneur's operating history at Spotless Group and Carambar & Co provides a direct line to corporate spin-outs and succession-driven sales. The firm also positions itself as a relational partner to founder-owners who value operational over financial engineering — a positioning that brings off-market MBO and MBI opportunities.

The firm pursues primary MBOs, MBIs, OBOs, and growth-equity transactions, with occasional delistings such as the September 2020 take-private of EasyVista alongside Eurazeo PME. Stage mapping from the portfolio shows the firm avoiding true venture risk: the smallest revenue company on the site reported €10M, and the operating-income floor is €1M. The typical entry is a maturity-stage services business ready for operational scaling rather than product-market-fit iteration.

Momentum Invest publishes no formal exclusion list, but the portfolio logic is clear: the firm avoids capital-intensive manufacturing, biotech, extractive industries, and pure-play technology platforms. Every portfolio company operates in a services sub-vertical — IT consulting, digital marketing, building renovation, specialty distribution, certification — where the primary asset is a workforce. The farthest reach from pure services is Agriland, a natural-ingredients manufacturer that Momentum frames as an industrial-service hybrid with IP in extraction processes.

The firm structurally co-invests with institutional partners. The Agriland transaction in June 2024 closed alongside TAG Partners and Cèdre, and the Groupe Eddifis deal in January 2021 included Bpifrance as a co-investor. Momentum does not formalize a co-investment program on its website, but the LP base — which includes the European Investment Fund and Bpifrance in addition to private investors — suggests the partnership model is deliberately porous, integrating institutional co-underwriters on larger or more specialized transactions.

The firm operates exclusively through its own two FPCI vehicles and invests directly into portfolio companies. There is no evidence of fund-of-funds activity, LP commitments to third-party managers, or secondary-market transactions. The limited-partner roster on the firm's site lists private and institutional investors who commit capital to Momentum's vehicles, not to an array of external funds.

The four founding partners — Cochenet, le Tanneur, Parisot, and Bureau — form the senior decision-making tier, with Olivier Guine as the most recent addition to the associate partner pool. The firm publicly names no successor generation or formal transition timeline. Le Tanneur's concurrent role as non-Executive Chair of Carambar & Co signals that at least one founding partner already operates with a portfolio-oversight model — but the operational heft concentrated in the founders remains the firm's principal key-person risk.