The Carmine Capital team is delighted to announce the arrival of Ghislain Dupré as Tech M&A Director, who takes over responsability of Carmine Venture, a dedicated practice to Tech and Innovation.
A volatile market context, favorable to the emergence of a radically new role for Tech M&A advisors
With over a decade’s experience working with Tech companies, Ghislain Dupré sums up the essential elements of the current situation: “Tech executives are now faced with a triple imperative: to demonstrate immediate operational excellence, to achieve break-even quickly and transparently, and to steer their capitalization table more prudently to balance operational deployment and capital control. The recent rise in key interest rates has made capital more expensive, and risk-taking is affecting start-ups more head-on. This situation is correcting a fundraising market that has recently been over-stretched. This context represents an opportunity for the M&A consulting profession if it radically transforms itself: this is the reason for the creation of Carmine Venture.”
Expanding and refining M&A advisory services
Carmine Capital has long been keen to create a dedicated offering for the Tech sector, which has recently experienced considerable turbulence.
Anne-Laure Beuriot adds: “Over the last 10 years, the start-up financing ecosystem has grown enormously, encouraging start-ups to raise funds even when it was not appropriate to do so. Our support is designed to give entrepreneurs a global vision of the opportunities available to them in terms of development and financing. We often find, for example, that entrepreneurs ignore or dismiss (for the wrong reasons) the solution of backing a mature company in their environment.”
With 6 years’ experience in Corporate Venture, Ghislain Dupré has worked with all the players in this sector: researchers, investment funds, bankers, regulators, acquirers, entrepreneurs and incubators.
“The Tech sector is new, deep and unexplored. The real breakthroughs in usage and replacement models are still ahead of us. That’s why the difficulty, and also the interest, of this business consists in simultaneously disentangling the truly innovative nature of solutions from those that are more marginally innovative, while assessing the resilience of this innovation in its economic model, which must be designed to resist,” explains Ghislain Dupré.
He adds: “Many innovations have yet to show their full potential. I’m thinking in particular of physical decarbonation exploitation tools, maritime and nautical innovation, Web3 for e-commerce or Sport Tech.”
More complex capital transactions
As management’s responsibilities increase, so do their need for support in strategic operations. However, the board of directors shares this context: it also must link the demands of the market, shareholders and operations. It becomes a right-hand man, sometimes very operational, in any case transparent on all the elements of the start-up’s growth.
Ghislain Dupré adds: “I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside all the players who, at any given time, help a start-up to grow. It’s the knowledge of their expertise and their use at the right time that can activate the lever to secure one stage and move on to the next. I was impressed by the composure, intuition, listening skills and humility of these managers, who demonstrated a genuine path of initiation, made up of sharpness and conciliation.”
Competitive innovation, prudence and pragmatism
Ghislain Dupré shares his enthusiasm about this opportunity: “It’s a joy and an honor to join Carmine Capital and create their Venture practice.
After 14 years spent in M&A and serving tech companies, this personal turning point is also that of the market, which is moving in directions that I hope to embody: competitive innovation, prudence and pragmatism.
These are also Carmine’s values, to which are added a strong identity, the freedom to undertake day-to-day business with our customers, and a joyful ambition!”
Entrepreneurial support and functional expertise
Anne-Laure Beuriot expresses her enthusiasm about the arrival of Ghislain Dupré and the creation of Carmine Venture: “Carmine Capital has a great deal of functional expertise enabling it to meet a strong ambition: to support entrepreneurs at every stage of their company’s development. Ghislain and his team have my full confidence in the development of Carmine Venture’s activities, and in contributing to the emergence of the future champions of French Tech.”
Specialized in technology and digital companies, Ghislain Dupré began his career at KPMG in 2011, where he worked with future unicorns such as Qonto, N26 and Swile. He then diversified into Large Corporate for the BNP Paribas Group in London. Curious and committed, Ghislain co-founded a Corporate Ventures team in the banking sector in 2017: he then took part in the creation of an incubator, then a Tech acceleration lab (~100 start ups in portfolio), and carried out 30+ acquisitions on behalf of the Group (Shine, Treezor, Forge, FinBricks). With his expertise in Web3, AI, DeepTech and Data, he brings to the startup managers he advises his experience in funding strategy, scaling and operational and human transformation.
He joined Carmine Capital in February 2023 to create the Carmine Venture activity, with the ambition of bringing together the industrial and technology ecosystems, and helping the future champions of French Tech to emerge.
To get more information, please contact Anne-Laure Beuriot and Ghislain Dupre.
