The rest of the 100 (in alphabetical order): Rémi Prunier, Orange Digital Ventures
Since 2016 Rémi Prunier has been an investment manager at Orange Digital Ventures, the €150m ($170m) corporate venturing fund of France-based telecoms operator Orange Group.
Marc Rennard, chairman and CEO of Orange Digital Ventures, said: “Rémi is a key element of the team. He is fast-learning, dedicated and hardworking. Over the past few years he has developed a strong expertise in the field of business-to-business, cyberdefence and artificial intelligence startups. He has also been instrumental in developing a new joint go-to-market to help our portfolio startups accelerate with commercial synergies with Orange Business Services, our enterprise unit dedicated to Fortune 500 companies.”
Prunier has always worked on developing business in growth areas for multiservice operators such as Orange as his last job was head of sales for large accounts. And he brings these insights to his portfolio, where he is currently on the board of three startups – SecBi, FollowAnalytics and Morphisec.
He said: “I have helped Morphisec, a successful cybersecurity startup, reach a next step in its expansion after our investment. I helped them to sign a reseller agreement with Orange Cyberdefense in only a few months. I am also partly in charge of the relationship with the tech ecosystem – France Digitale, FranceIsAI, Vivatech, GoIgnite, ECSO and so on.
“Venture capital is a rich and complicated job, and so is corporate venturing. Acquiring the key financial and legal knowledge base required to understand a termsheet, and what a good investment opportunity is, has been a real challenge for the first months, especially since I came from a very different professional environment.”
