Grégoire de Padirac came to venture investing after running Orange’s distribution partnership with Deezer and working in strategy consulting, and he was based in Senegal while covering the Middle East and Africa at Orange Ventures across sectors like IoT, cybersecurity, eHealth, and entertainment. He focuses on underfunded and smaller African markets, arguing the real opportunity lies in the gap between perceived and actual risk, and he pairs this with attention to training talent for startups, board and advisor roles at companies like Youverify, Chari, and Africa's Talking, and a continued link between Orange Ventures and Digital Africa after moving to lead the latter.
About their Fund
Orange Ventures operates as a separate legal entity from its telecom parent, Orange, which creates a clear boundary around confidentiality and conflicts of interest while still keeping Orange's business synergies available on a flexible, optional basis; it also invests in startups before those synergies are proven, a bet that led 90% of its 2021–2022 startup group to end up working with Orange Group, with two staff members whose job is specifically to help portfolio companies work with the larger company. In Africa and the Middle East, the fund draws on Orange's on-the-ground presence across roughly 17-18 countries—including its distribution networks, cell towers, and mobile money systems—to find startups that fit within Orange's role as a multi-service operator spanning mobile money, energy, and logistics, and it runs its investments differently by region and goal, with separate tracks for European software startups, Middle East/Africa growth-stage startups, and a dedicated €30 million fund for environmental and social impact startups.
















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