Serena

Managing Partners Marc Fournier and Xavier Lorphelin lead the firm, with a partnership that includes sector-focused investors like Sébastien Le Roy (CFO stack, enterprise) and venture partners such as Bertrand Diard, the founder of Talend. Investment committees draw on the firm's operator-heavy team, where roughly half of the professionals have founded or scaled companies themselves.

The firm sources through its Serena Squad community and the PALM operating platform, which embeds former founders and functional experts inside the portfolio and the broader European tech ecosystem. This operator network, combined with targeted thematic funds like Data Ventures II and Racine², gives the firm early visibility into technical founders in AI, open-source, and climate before formal fundraises.

Serena is a venture capital manager, not a family office. It manages third-party capital across multiple thematic funds and deploys roughly €1 billion in aggregate. The firm has no ties to a single-family pool.

Serena makes direct equity investments into companies, typically leading or co-leading rounds from pre-seed to Series A. The firm does not market itself as a fund-of-funds or LP in other venture managers.

The firm covers pre-seed through Series A, with first checks ranging from €100,000 to €15 million. Its growth-stage Serena IV fund extends into later rounds for applied AI and energy transition companies that the firm backed at earlier stages.

The firm's public materials do not list explicit sector exclusions. The strategies are organized around positive theses — applied AI, energy transition, modern data infrastructure, blockchain, quantum, impact (environment, education, well-being), and consumer innovation — rather than prohibited categories.

Both are dedicated funds managed by Serena. Racine² is an €80 million impact vehicle launched with MGEN and makesense, targeting environment, education, and well-being (per firm website). Data Ventures II focuses on modern data stack, AI, open-source, blockchain, and quantum infrastructure. They operate under the same Serena partnership and share the firm's operating platform.