My fourth Venture Capital experience took me somewhere I never expected.

After healthcare.

After artificial intelligence.

After deeptech and energy.

I found myself discovering… stablecoins.

To be honest, I initially thought this world was mainly about crypto.

I quickly realized it was actually about something much bigger.

Payments.

Liquidity.

Trust.

Infrastructure.

For more than thirty years in industry, international payments were simply part of doing business.

Necessary.

Expensive.

Sometimes slow.

Rarely questioned.

Meeting the founders of Solide Finance completely changed my perspective.

Their ambition is not to reinvent banking.

It is to rethink one of its oldest infrastructures: international payments and foreign exchange.

Using blockchain and stablecoins, they are building technology that allows financial institutions to settle cross-border transactions in real time while remaining fully compliant with regulatory requirements.

What fascinated me was not the technology itself.

It was the question behind it.

Why should moving money across borders still rely on infrastructures designed decades ago?

Like every major technological transition, this one is not really about replacing existing systems overnight.

It is about making them faster.

More transparent.

More efficient.

And ultimately, more useful.

This investment taught me something else.

Innovation is often misunderstood.

People tend to associate it with products.

Increasingly, the greatest transformations happen inside infrastructures we never see.

Payment networks.

Identity.

Data.

Carbon markets.

Artificial intelligence.

The invisible layers we discussed in my previous posts.

Perhaps that is why this first journey as a Business Angel has been so energizing.

I met founders tackling completely different industries.

Healthcare.

Artificial intelligence.

DeepTech.

Financial infrastructure.

Yet they all shared the same mindset.

They were not trying to build fashionable companies.

They were solving real problems.

With discipline.

With courage.

And with remarkable optimism.

After spending more than three decades helping established companies grow, I now have the privilege of witnessing another kind of growth.

The birth of tomorrow‘s industrial and technological champions.

This is also why I remain deeply optimistic.

No, Europe is not running out of ideas.

No, France is not condemned to watch innovation happen elsewhere.

Quite the opposite.

Some extraordinary entrepreneurs are quietly building the next generation of businesses.

I feel privileged to meet them.

And even more privileged to learn from them.

Have a wonderful summer.

I’ll be back in a few weeks with new discoveries, new entrepreneurs and, I hope, new reasons to remain optimistic.