Marie Ekeland, one of France’s most renowned venture capitalists, has squeezed in breakfast with me one morning before she flies to Chicago to meet potential business partners.
She arrives at La Bastille, a Parisian cafe just a stone’s throw from the iconic revolutionary plaza, sandwiched between two bulky packs, one strapped to her front and one to her back, that suggest a pending trek through the mountains rather than a transatlantic flight to schmooze business suits.
As we sit and both order the formule petit-déjeuner (OJ, double espresso, croissant), I ask why she’s chosen this restaurant. She explains that this spot holds strong, personal meaning because it’s just a couple of blocks from the Marché d'Aligre, a covered market where several generations on her mother’s side ran a butcher’s. Ekeland has a blended heritage — with Norwegian and Corsican grandparents — that makes her feel European first, rather than French.
This cafe is also where she held early clandestine meetings to form 2050, the un-venture capital firm that has developed a non-traditional structure to make long-term bets on companies addressing systemic problems like climate change. Rather than general partners, 2050 is overseen by a trust and invests through an evergreen fund which makes promises annual returns for its investors.
The launch of 2050 more than two years ago was the latest pivot by Ekeland, who has played a central role in the rise of France’s tech ecosystem over the past two decades. She joined VC fund Elaia in its earliest days, invested in adtech startup Criteo (whose IPO was a seminal event for France), started community-powered VC firm Daphni to reinvent startup investing and cofounded France Digitale to address systematic roadblocks to innovation.
The ability to flout convention and chart one’s course has been central to her success. And it is now the idea at the core of 2050.
“Existing venture capital structures and management companies are very hard to change structurally,” she says. “Nothing is pushing you to innovate. All the incentives are to bet on the same thing, the same recipes that have worked before. Investment decisions are made on historical data. If something worked before, that means it will work in the future, which is not what I believe. So I had to leave to build something new.”
The Rise
Ekeland had a nomadic upbringing that proved liberating. Her father, a maths researcher, took a sabbatical at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and brought the whole family. They frequently returned for summers and extended holidays, and Ekeland grew up learning to read in English first. Thanks to sprinkles of Norwegian, Canadian and Corsican accents, Ekeland speaks an inflected French and English that she says listeners have a hard time placing. Having many identities, rather than a single one, left her free to explore different approaches to life.
“You can understand that one culture is just one benchmark and is composed of different rules that you can accept or not,” she says. “You can pick what you believe is the most relevant for you from all these different frameworks.”
For her, that meant declining a chance to apply to some of France’s most elite universities because she felt the process was too restrictive and competitive. She wanted a more well-rounded education.
That included playing volleyball, where Ekeland excelled at the national level until an injury ended her career at the age of 27. Volleyball fed her competitive spirit but in the right way.
“I like competition when it’s a common goal,” she says. “I don’t like competition when you have to prove you're better than somebody else. I like volleyball because it's so inventive. And you play all these different roles in the team. It’s the only team sport where you don’t touch the other team players. So, you can compete without harming the other person.”
After getting a degree in maths and computer science, she went to work at JP Morgan in New York in 1997. She returned to Paris after two years because, while she loved NYC, she was worried the city would “eat me up”.
“That experience made my career very action-driven,” she says. “The American culture of the workplace is very different from the French culture. The French think a lot before doing anything.”
At JP Morgan, Ekeland was building digital systems for traders but felt she wanted to do something that more directly addressed the world’s problems. She returned to school, got a master’s degree in economics and then began looking for a job with a startup in France. A friend recommended she speak with Xavier Lazarus, an entrepreneur who had recently sold his edtech startup and knew the tech landscape in France.
Ekeland showed up wearing flip-flops and a casual summer dress and explained her background and interests. Lazarus listened and then suggested that her profile in tech, product, business and economics would make her a perfect fit for his new project: venture capital investing.
She replied: “What is venture capital?”
Inventing French VC
Our one-hour breakfast rendezvous has moved into its second hour. The French call their morning meal “petit” for a reason, and we’ve long since dispensed with our respective croissants. The dining area, which was relatively quiet and empty when we arrived, is starting to fill with a late-morning crowd that brings a crescendo of conversation.
On the wooden table, Ekeland’s vibrating phone suggests she’s already missing some meetings, likely upending an already crammed agenda. But having launched on the tale of herself, she has no intention of stopping halfway.
When Lazarus helped create a venture-investing arm for French bank Crédit Agricole in 2000, it was one of the few VCs in France at the time. With the dot-com bubble bursting, the timing was auspicious. Still, Ekeland joined him, and then in 2004, followed Lazarus after he left to start an independent VC firm, Elaia.
While the VC playbook had been written in Silicon Valley, Ekeland says she didn’t feel bound by it. And while she was often the only woman in the room when meeting with founders or other VCs, she found this liberating rather than limiting.
“It gave me a lot of freedom because I have no role model,” she says. “So I just questioned the job. What is a good venture capitalist? I think this was the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. The fact that I had the freedom to design what a French woman venture capitalist could be.”
It didn’t take Ekeland long to make her mark. Her first investment for Elaia was Criteo, which was developing a product recommendation engine for ecommerce sites. Ekeland met one of the cofounders, serial entrepreneur Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, at a founder-investor matchmaking event.
“I remember the first thing he said to me was, ‘Who are you? I know everyone that I’m meeting today except you’.” Ekeland says.
Ekeland was immediately drawn to Criteo’s concept, and she and Rudelle continued to talk in the coming months, demonstrating that she grasped the business and concept and how they could help merchants better serve customers. She eventually convinced him to let Elaia — which was more focused on B2B and deeptech — make the firm’s first web investment.
Criteo’s initial concept didn’t pan out. But the company pivoted to adtech and became a global leader, eventually going public on the Nasdaq exchange in 2013. That $2bn IPO is considered a seminal event in the development of France’s startup ecosystem. Elaia’s early-stage investment of less than $10m gave it a 13.5% stake in Criteo.
“It showed that it was possible, that you could be based in France and build a business that could become a leader,” Ekeland says.
This was the first of several successful investments — including Scoop.it and Teads — that began to raise her public profile. As she became more prominent, she scanned the French and European startup landscape and noted common problems that were holding back startups and VCs: lack of digital talent, regulation, absence of growth capital from foreign investors and reluctance by European institutional investors to become LPs in VC funds.
As she began advocating at the French and European levels for reforms to promote entrepreneurship, she became a de facto spokesperson for VCs and founders. In the summer of 2012, she cofounded France Digitale as an association to represent the tech ecosystem. Later that year, after the government backtracked on a controversial tax that sparked a rebellion from the tech sector, Ekeland became part of a government working group that generated the proposals that led to the creation of La French Tech mission, the government’s startup support program.
This activism reinforced her belief that the most important changes needed to occur on a systematic level and that she wanted to approach being a VC in a new way. So she left Elaia in 2015 to launch a new venture fund — with four other founding partners — called Daphni, which embraced a venture-capital-as-a-platform model that included a community of 300 partners to help source deals and advise portfolio companies.
Ekeland saw an opportunity to deploy digital tools to make the venture model more effective for European startups. Through its playful branding and early-stage bets, the company also scored some key investments, backing unicorns such as Back Market, Swile and Lifen.
So it was a surprise when Ekeland and two other founding partners — Mathieu Daix and Willy Braun — announced they were leaving in 2019. Ekeland says that, as she began to push for a more radical approach to investing, it created tension within Daphni and a feeling that the founders were no longer aligned. The remaining firm merged with Jaina Capital but retained the Daphni name and subsequently raised a third fund.
She acknowledges that people thought she was crazy to leave.
“Did you feel Daphni was successful?” I ask.
“Well, no, because I left,” says Ekeland, who still manages 40% of Daphni’s portfolio. “Let me clarify. I feel it definitely was successful and is successful financially and the company is thriving. I'm very proud of what we've built with Daphni. But the reason that I say no, and the reason that I left to go start 2050, is that I realised through this experience that the venture capital model as it is, is not suited to fuel the sustainable transformation that we need.”
The future of VC
In building 2050, Ekeland sought to create something that could make investments in a way that would create change on an even wider systematic level. She saw a world where every aspect of society and economy was being forced to change, whether it was through advancing technology, government regulation, or the pressure of climate change.
“We're living in a complete transformation of the economy,” she says.
2050 is designed to make investments for a longer term. Rather than being run by partners, 2050 is managed by a trust. In place of a series of funds that might have 5 to 10-year horizons, 2050 has a single, regenerative fund that will give limited partners 5% annual liquidity on the overall value of the fund starting in 2026, an additional 25% of any exits, and access, if needed, to accelerated liquidity by selling shares on secondary markets. This would make success less dependent on a single big acquisition or IPO.
The goal is for that fund to reach €1bn by 2030 so that 2050 can invest between €100m to €150m annually. Ekeland says 2050 currently has €130m in assets under management. The challenge remains finding potential investors who are willing to take the same systematic approach rather than focusing on short-term returns.
The firm has made 10 venture investments, including carbon accounting platform Sweep and sustainable agriculture startup Omie. Overall, 2050 has backed six companies in France, two in Sweden, one in the Netherlands and one in the US.
The firm has grown to about a dozen team members, including Olivier Mathiot, the former CEO and cofounder of French ecommerce startup PriceMinister, who cofounded France Digitale with Ekeland.
The firm also takes 50% of the carried interest and puts it back into the firm to fund research and educational initiatives such as the development of “alignment playbooks” for both startups and corporates. The first playbook was a climate change course developed at her alma mater, Université Paris Dauphine, with professors including her father, Ivar.
Part of that research is also about refining 2050’s approach. The company wants to understand all the points in a value chain involved in creating or delivering something, and then invest in companies along that value chain that could change the broader system.
“Venture capital has been designed to fuel digital companies that have a seven-year cycle of hyper-growth or growth at all costs,” Ekeland says. “And not to fuel those systematic shifts. So that means if you think that way, you need to understand first what is missing for a value chain to shift and to invest all along the value chain.”
A good example of this approach is the Swedish company Paebbl. Last year, 2050 participated in its €8m seed round. The company has developed technology that can capture carbon in the air and then use it to develop construction materials. That reduces both carbon in the atmosphere and reduces the production of new carbon to create a product that can be sold and generate revenues.
“You're optimising impact and revenue,” Ekeland says. “This is what we try to look for.”
As we stand to leave and pay the bill, I ask her: “Does it feel like 2050 is on the path to becoming the thing you think it needs to be to accomplish your goals?”
Ekeland thinks for a moment, and then says: “Yes, definitely… It's hard to build new categories. But we think we're building the category of the future of how to align capital to build a sustainable future. There are not that many other people trying something so structured and so coherent as what we are doing. It takes longer than what I've done before, but it's way deeper than what I’ve done before.”
