Seed · Series A · France and Europe
We invest €100,000 to €500,000 in impossible animals.
Welcome to swanbase. A black swanBlack Swan · noun · /blak swɒn/1. An extreme, unpredictable event considered highly improbable, yet capable of reshaping entire financial markets when it strikes from the shadows.2. A phenomenon that shatters conventional statistical models and defies prediction. Only after it happens do the patterns emerge. Only after chaos do we see the form it took.The Black Swan is an impossible event that happens anyway. At swanbase, we help the startup everyone doubted. And we empower the founders who proved them wrong.Origin: for centuries everyone believed all swans were white, until black swans were discovered in Australia. is the impossible event that happens anyway. We look for its startup equivalent: the company everyone doubted, and that sells. Building one, at seed or Series A, in France or anywhere else in Europe? Pitch it to us in 10 questions. We read every request by hand.
10 questions · 2 minutes · every request read by hand
Our six investment theses
We look for impossible animals in six structural dynamics that hold whatever the economic cycle. Each thesis opens with the sentence we hear from founders who belong to it. If one of them describes your startup, we want to read you.
Manifesto These theses come from our reading of European innovation. Read our manifesto →
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01Hidden Markets
Hidden markets
Your market has no glamour and your customers pay without arguing.
Sectors seen as boring, ignored by large players, that solve concrete European problems with recurring revenue: automated regulatory compliance, industrial waste management, medical cold-chain logistics.
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02New Primitives
New building blocks
Other teams plug your product into theirs.
Reusable technologies that tend to become a standard: a unified payment API for European e-commerce, sovereign data infrastructure, a traceability protocol, an SDK for industrial IoT.
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03Behavioral Shifts
Behaviour shifts
You equip a recent habit that will not go back.
When a behaviour becomes permanent, it creates entire markets: monetisation for creators, digital therapeutics, the circular economy for electronics, asynchronous collaboration.
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04Technological Unlocks
Technology unlocks
A recent breakthrough makes possible what cost ten times too much yesterday.
Technologies that open a new market instead of improving an old one: specialised generative AI, computational biology for predictive diagnosis, sovereign edge computing.
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05Negative Correlations
Countercyclical
Your sales pitch gets stronger when the economy suffers.
Businesses whose demand rises with uncertainty: cybersecurity for critical infrastructure, cost-cutting automation, energy storage, resilient supply chains.
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06Low Hanging Fruits Souverains
Sovereign reconquest
Europeans already pay a US player every day that serves their constraints poorly.
The technology is mature and the demand exists: affordable sovereign cloud for SMEs, payments independent of US card networks, European encrypted messaging, a sovereign office suite.
What we look for in a team
- A scalable model, able to grow far beyond a local market.
- At least two complementary co-founders.
- A team that builds its own product.
- Founders working full time on the startup.
- Customers or users who prove the demand.
Who invests
swanbase is Vincent Maurin and Théo Sitjar. We have built three companies together since 2018: Panja, a growth marketing agency, Takema and swanbase. Since then we have worked with more than 100 clients and generated more than €10M in revenue.
Meet the team →How it works
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01
You pitch your startup
Ten questions: your product, your revenue over the last 12 months, the amount you are raising and how far along your fundraise is. The link to your deck is optional.
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02
We read your request
We read every request by hand. If your startup fits our theses, you get an email with the link to open your data room on data.swanbase.co.
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03
You build your data room
A 60-second intro video, the problem, the solution, the founders, the product stage and your proof. The file stays private: only your team and ours can see it.
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04
We review your file
We run our investment review from your data room. Once we approve it, you publish it and share the same link with the other investors you approach.
Frequently asked questions
How much does swanbase invest?
Between €100,000 and €500,000 per startup, at seed and Series A.
Do you invest outside France?
Yes. We review startups from all over Europe.
Is my data room visible while I build it?
No. Until we approve it, your data room stays private. Its link only opens for your team and ours, and your startup appears in no list.
Do I need to have gone through the swanbase program?
No. This page is for startups that are already raising, whether or not they went through The Nest. If your product is not live yet, the way into swanbase is The Nest.
Are you an impossible animal?
Pitch us your startup: ten questions, two minutes. We reply by email, and on WhatsApp when it is faster.
Pitch my startup