France now hosts more than thirty unicorns and some of them are likely to go public in the following years. The challenge is to improve the attractiveness of the Paris marketplace for all European tech companies to find the financing they need to pursue their development, and thus limit the temptation of listing on the Nasdaq.

New financial and non financial initiatives

In that context, the Euronext Tech Leaders segment was launched in June 2022,with  the creation of a new initiative bringing together more than 100 high-growth listed European Tech companies, 41 of them listed in Paris, with a total capitalization of  of 258 billion euros at launch. In addition, an array of services and visibility initiatives have been deployed by Euronext for listed and pre-listed companies.

Other initiatives have reinforced this one, to bring a package of responses by CDC Croissance, Caisse des Dépôts’ asset management subsidiary dedicated to listed SMEs, endowed with 300 million euros to support French unicorns IPOs on Paris stock exchange, Bpifrance, in close collaboration with Euronext, and with the Scale up Europe initiative launched by President Macron in 2021 would also mobilise an envelope of 500 million euros to play an active role in future IPOs of French scale-ups, either as a corner stone investor or as a follower investor.

Helping to build lasting relationships between cornerstone investors

Bpifrance also announced the creation of a  » Cornerstone investors club » (i.e. « cornerstone » investors in IPOs*), as an informal meeting place to exchange between private equity funds and institutional asset managers specialized in Tech with the objective to develop the French listed tech ecosystem and encourage the creation of an investment continuum from unlisted to listed.

Actually, it is crucial for the ecosystem to facilitate exchanges between potential Cornerstone investors and to bring them together regularly. It is also important for Cornerstone investors and the management of future IPO candidates to have the opportunity to meet upstream of the deal and to get to know each other:  on one hand gain a better understanding of the company and its strategy, on the other hand get to know the expectations of asset managers.

The club organizes 4 to 5 events every years, building lasting relationships between Club members, including meetings with technology company executives, pitch sessions with presentations and Q&A sessions, members’ presentation, etc.