eFounders turns 10 🎂

Launching a company is far from being easy. It requires relentless work, a lot of resources, and crazy amounts of energy. Back in the early days, the eFounders core team barely existed, we were a team of 3 trying to get one company off the ground per year (if we were lucky!).

Little did we know that 10 years later we would have launched 30 companies, with a few on track to becoming unicorns. That our core team would be 15 people strong. That our portfolio valuation would reach the symbolic milestone of $2 billion and that we would have generated 1500 jobs in countries across the world. While we did have huge ambitions from the start, we can’t help but feel incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved and so grateful for all the people that’s contributed to what eFounders is now.

Building one company is hard. Building thirty is a feat we didn’t know was possible.

A new model of entrepreneurship

At eFounders, we couldn’t be further away from the cliché of the entrepreneur building all alone in his/her garage. In 10 years, we’ve managed to create a new model of entrepreneurship, one that involves building companies in parallel (launching multiple startups at once) and doing so as a team (with the eFounders core team supporting our early-stage startups).

We’ve proven that building companies as a team will always win against individual performances.

Central to our startup studio is also our focus on launching companies that are truly innovative with the goal of making them independent 12–18 months after we launch them.

And crucially, we have always aimed our attention at entrepreneurs. We’ve managed to build a strong brand that now allows us to attract top talent. Hundreds of entrepreneurs come knocking at our door to join us, in a given year. And when we choose to cofound a company with a founder, we make a point of giving them the majority of equity. We want to attract the best and brightest.

Behind the numbers

Today, as we celebrate the 10 years since we came into existence, we cross a symbolic milestone. The total valuation of the companies in our portfolio has now reached $2 billion, only 18 months after it surpassed $1 billion, which highlights the fast pace of growth of our mighty community of companies.

This coincides with us having launched a total of 30 companies since our inception. They’ve raised a total of more than $400 million with leading VCs in the US and Europe (Sequoia, Accel, Index Ventures, Creandum…) with combined revenue of over $130 million ARR. And while our end goal isn’t exits, five companies have been acquired with TextMaster, Mention, Mailjet, Hivy, and Briq.

More importantly, we’ve generated over 1500 jobs in offices in Paris, San Francisco, New York, Sydney, Berlin, Madrid and in remote locations across the world. And we currently have over 170 job openings.

But beyond funding and valuations numbers, what we’re most proud of over the past decade is to have partnered with tens of entrepreneurs and to have created products that have helped millions of teams around the world collaborate better together. We believe that this is what truly validates our model

Scaling eFounders

It’s difficult to build more than six companies a year without losing what’s made our success so far: acting as the co-founders of the companies we build. And so to scale the eFounders model, we’re exploring different opportunities, such as backing more mature companies like we did with Yousign or replicating the eFounders model across other verticals as we did with Camille Tyan for Logic Founders.

We’re planning on partnering with more successful entrepreneurs and launch other startup studios in health, AI, blockchain, and more. And we’re still bubbling with new ideas and have huge ambitions to create game-changing products that inspire and adapt to our ever-changing new ways of working.

🙏

So thank you to everyone. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, a startup studio is all about the people: the ones that cofound companies with us, the ones who join our early-stage companies, the ones who join the Core Team to help us give unfair advantages, the ones we meet along the way. Without all of them, we wouldn’t be able to celebrate such a milestone. Our 10 years is for all of you. For you to celebrate what we’ve achieved, and everything else that’s ahead of us. The best is on the way.