Vives

CEO and Managing Partner Philippe Durieux leads the investment committee alongside Partner Eric Marchandise. Both have been with the firm since its founding in 2004. The small partnership structure means every investment decision passes through the partners directly, with no delegation to junior principals or external advisors beyond the family-office network that sits on the advisory board.

Vives sources deals primarily through the technology-transfer office of UCLouvain and its partner universities in Belgium, France, and Switzerland. The firm also receives referrals from the 30 Belgian industrial families that co-invest alongside the fund, who often identify commercial applications for university IP within their own sectors. Vives does not rely on broad inbound founder outreach or agent-led auctions.

Vives is neither a traditional venture capital firm nor a single-family office. It operates as an evergreen fund with UCLouvain as the primary anchor LP and a consortium of Belgian multi-family and corporate investors as co-LPs. The structure behaves like a permanent capital vehicle, giving it flexibility to hold positions beyond typical VC fund lifecycles without requiring LP extensions.

Vives targets seed and Series A rounds, writing initial cheques between €500,000 and €2.5 million. The firm reserves significant capital for follow-on investments through Series B, and its evergreen structure allows it to support portfolio companies across multiple funding rounds without the forced liquidity schedules of a fixed-life fund.

Vives avoids consumer internet, marketplaces, and any sector where competitive advantage does not derive from a defensible scientific or technical moat. The fund explicitly stays away from business models built primarily on customer acquisition cost arbitrage, and it has never invested in pure-play e-commerce, ad-tech, or content-platform companies.

UCLouvain is the founding anchor LP of Vives and provides a significant share of the fund's capital. The relationship goes deeper than an LP commitment — Vives has preferential access to the university's intellectual property pipeline through its technology-transfer office, and the fund's investment thesis was designed specifically to commercialise UCLouvain-originated research. UCLouvain does not manage the fund, however, and the investment team operates independently.

Yes. Vives regularly co-invests alongside SRIW, Sambrinvest, and SFPI-FPIM, the Walloon and federal public investment arms that share its mandate of developing the Belgian technology ecosystem. These co-investors frequently join Vives-led rounds at seed and Series A stages, and Vives also welcomes family-office LPs into direct co-investments on a deal-by-deal basis.