Vision

At Bleu Capital, our investment philosophy is grounded in one core principle:

the desire to help humanity achieve its best possible version.

As an evergreen fund, we’re uniquely positioned—and indeed obligated—to take a long-term view in our investment strategy. Our mission is to grow assets over decades, requiring us to anticipate major societal and technological shifts. We aim to identify these shifts early enough to contribute meaningfully to their development, while timing our investments to benefit from their widespread adoption.

We’ve successfully navigated two significant waves of change, and now we’re poised to embark on a third.

Bleu's founder, Jean Pierre Chessé, played a pivotal role in one of the most transformative trends of the past decade: the globalization of trade and the interweaving of the world’s economies and cultures. At just 26, three years after the Tiananmen Square events, JP launched what would become China’s largest importer of Western food brands—despite minimal capital and limited experience in the country.

Bootstrapping his way to hundreds of millions in revenue over 20 years, JP eventually exited to a publicly traded company. This journey, though simplified here, is the foundation of our core operating principles and the DNA of Bleu Capital. It drives our relentless focus on efficient growth, believing that constraints and efficiency breed creativity, iteration speed, and a sharper focus on what truly matters.

After his exit, JP relocated to the U.S., hired two partners, Vincent Diallo (his ex-CFO) and Joseph Sartre, to help redeploy his capital into new ventures. They aimed to leverage the ongoing trend of global commerce, having witnessed the early stages of the next major shift: the rapid acceleration of online commerce and the emergence of a new technical stack for cloud-based commerce. Vincent established our presence in San Francisco, while Joseph focused on the New York City market.

Bleucap's first wave of capital was deployed into ten seed-stage companies, ultimately leading to the creation of a separate vehicle, Interlace Ventures, dedicated solely to this strategy. In 2020, Vincent and Joseph transitioned full-time to Interlace, and JP assumed direct leadership of Bleu Capital. I joined the fund that same year, coming from Bleu’s portfolio company Ara Labs, where I led growth operations and collaborated closely with JP, who was a board member.

From that point on, Bleu Capital naturally evolved towards commerce enablement, investing in platforms like For Days and DataHawk, vertical SaaS companies like Malou, ContentSquare, and Kiliba, and infrastructure firms like Skip, Mediarithmics, and Standard AI. Our vision was clear: as retailers increasingly integrated data into their processes, the next wave of automation would be unleashed.

Approaching the next decade, shifts in consumer expectations, market maturation and saturation in software markets led us to look for the next major shift. Bleucap started investing in climate as a natural drift from our commerce strategy (For Days, Hubcycle). And in 2023, we decided to commit 100% of our attention to the climate vertical. Here's why.

Since the 70s, the progress we’ve enjoyed has been staggering. Global poverty rates have dropped from 60% to 15%. The world’s GDP grew from $3 trillion to $100 trillion in that timespan. Tail-winded by the reduction of global poverty and increased output of our production systems, humankind is bound to reach 10 billion people by 2050.

However, it appears we are now coasting on the dividends of this previous period of innovation and expansion. As the fruits of past efforts begin to wane, the urgency to discover new growth engines becomes ever more critical.The next chapter of global development hinges on our ability to decarbonize economies and make substantial investments in hard industrials.

To build upon this tremendous progress, preserve the American Dream and create a foundation for prosperity for all, the key will be to fundamentally overhaul our systems of production. This transition not only addresses the pressing need for sustainable practices but also presents a pivotal opportunity for economic revitalization. The challenge is clear: we must leverage innovation and capital to forge a new era of industrial advancement, one that aligns with environmental imperatives and economic ambitions alike.‍‍

The mid-2020s offers significantly improved conditions to drive a wave of technological innovation across our hard sectors. With software having reached later phases of its development and installation cycle, the attention of early-stage investors has now largely shifted to hard tech and deep tech innovation, bringing a wealth of capital to implement the derisked science of the 2010s. In Europe, climate tech investing is one of the most resilient sectors following the 2021 peak of venture investing. In the United States, venture capital money is slowly dripping into deep tech innovation again, with sectors such as manufacturing and defense seeing record funding levels.

And this time, sustainability interests are intermeshed with some of the largest and most lucrative investment opportunities of the decade, The current CAPEX cycle behind the unleashing of artificial intelligence will lead to vast investments in clean energy and grid connectivity. According to a recent Goldman Sachs report, the private sector is about to unleash $1 trillion in CAPEX for AI ramp up by the turn of the decade. Those new data centers will require tremendous energy volumes to run and for the first time, clean energy (especially solar) presents the best potential scalability and pricing, while nuclear is offering the most scalable long term solution.

Now is the time to build in those verticals and unlock the vast potential promised by the emergence of these technologies. I’m very excited to meet any founder looking for an active, high-conviction fund to unlock the next era of sustainable progress at scale.The revamping of our industrial base will require a combination of novel technologies with lean manufacturing processes. It’s not just about total capacity, but also about the efficiency of our production systems. The more efficiently we can transform matter (shape and mechanical properties), the more sustainable our industrial base will become.

Significant shifts in industry cycles require distinct driving forces to succeed and act as disruptors, emphasizing the importance of a well-timed "why now". Going back to innovation cycle theory, we look for markets where the capital to sustain technologies through the early innings of their development exists, in order to help them reach the deployment phase.

The late 2000s clean tech boom and bust served to establish the basis for the current cycle. These pioneers were not wrong in saying that “going green could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century” (A quote from KPCB’s John Doerr), they were just a decade early. But the billions invested served to attract the talent base and financing solutions, and financed the infrastructure that we are now able to leverage for the next generation.  

We see several catalysts simultaneously converting to unleash the renewal of our systems of production. These are not just acceleration coefficients for existing companies that enjoy benefits from scale, information, or distribution. They promise to deliver true disruption, giving new entrants a strong advantage relative to incumbents that suffer from a powerful innovator’s dilemma. Especially in hardware companies, which have traditionally been slower to embrace shifts.