RAISE Summit 2025 | Romain Mombert, Eurazeo Growth

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Romain Mombert

Managing Director

Eurazeo Growth

play_circle_outline Exploring the Future: RAISE Summit 2025 in Paris and Insights from Eurazeo Growth's Romain Mombert on AI Investments

play_circle_outline Emerging European Giants: Neo4j, Mistral, and the Rise of Global Category Leaders in Entrepreneurship and Investment

play_circle_outline Mention of Cognigy as a leader in conversational AI and its growth potential.

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Romain Mombert, Eurazeo Growth

Romain Mombert

Managing Director Eurazeo Growth

In this RAISE Summit segment, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Romain Mombert, managing director at Eurazeo Growth, to unpack how a new breed of European investors is going “risk on.” Mombert explains why the firm backs graph pioneers like Neo4j, frontier model builders such as Mistral and conversational AI leader Cognigy, all while importing Silicon Valley know-how through seasoned operating partners. The discussion highlights a third generation of founders who start global from day one, the shift from downside protection to upside conviction in Europea... Read more

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Romain Mombert, Eurazeo Growth

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>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here exclusive in Paris, France for the RAISE Summit 2025. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're coming down to the end of day two. We're closing it out here in Europe with a European investing platform that's making a ton of great bets in AI and really is a tell sign for what is coming in the future of European entrepreneurship. Romain Mombert's here, managing director at Eurazeo Growth. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for closing us out. You're the last interview, you're going to close out our exclusive coverage.

Romain Mombert

>> Oh, wow, what an honor! Thank you, John.

>> Thanks for coming on. So, I'm super psyched to talk

>> to you for two reasons. It's very fitting to close out with a European investor as good as you guys are. You're deploying a lot of capital, you're making bets, your risk is on. It's a great environment, you're doing a lot of AI from seed to later stage. You got some great names like Neo4j, Mistral, and a handful of other great growth companies. Well, first of all, congratulations and I think this is going to be a template. We're seeing a lot of other Europeans doing the same thing. What's it like to be that pioneer in Europe?

Romain Mombert

>> I think it's very exciting, John, because when I started working in this industry, you couldn't really build this very large business from Europe. So, take the example of Datadog and Snowflake, all European founders, but had to go to the US to find the know-how, to find the capital to build a very large software businesses. Then there has been a second generation like anyways, 2010 to 2020 and you started to have companies coming out from the ground and C-level starting to understand how you can create global business from Europe and that's really what we're after. The global category leader, but that are born in Europe, and now we are the third generation, which is very ambitious. That doesn't see any barrier to growth. I don't know if you think of the Mistral, we talk about it, the Lovable and day one, the world is their global play and they are not shy to go for it and they can find capital and they can find also investor like us that try to be as much value add as we can. We bring on board operating partners from very large successful US tech businesses that share their unique knowledge and know-how to the European entrepreneurs.

>> I mean entrepreneur investing is really easy. Just bet on the winners.

Romain Mombert

>> It sounds easy when you say it.

>> Of course, like I used to tell my kids,

>> "In soccer it's easy, just put the ball on the net. " It's hard. I mean it's hard, but it's a team sport. I want to bring that up, because it sounds easy but it's not and one of the things I noticed about Silicon Valley being there 25 years moving from the East Coast, from the New York area in Boston to California was this mindset of managing risk. East Coast used to be manage the downside scenario on the seed round, the angel investors or series A investors. West coast was managing the upside scenarios and assuming everything fails. Europe I think is moving over from managing, "What's in it for me? " Which really disables the founder, and Jonathan Ross from Groq was pointing that out to me in my last interview. The fact that you're doing what you're doing is a risk on, manage the upside, make the right bets. Are others following your footsteps? Is there a Keiretsu forming in Europe or is it by sovereign country? How is the landscape? What's the landscape like?

Romain Mombert

>> Yeah, so I think similarly to what I was describing from the tech landscape maturing over the generation and the cohorts, same happened with the investors. And I remember my early days when I was a banker and I would see very structured term sheets with compounding, with-

>> Perfective protective provisions on

>> hypotheticals. - ...

Romain Mombert

>> protective provisions. Yeah, exactly. I think we moved to something closer to the US mindset also because we have a lot of US fund now present in Europe and it's great because they're bringing their expertise and we're also partnering with them. And I think now also from the investor side, we're much more in this focused on the upside and actually we are very convinced that the upside can be as big as in the US, which was not the case 10 years ago. And so back to your point, we're actually looking to underwrite upside case in any scenarios that we try to bring to four, five X and so that's really what we are focusing on at the growth stage, at least. Venture will be more, but those kind of investment didn't exist so much, so people were focusing a lot on the downside.

>> Well, I appreciate what you do.

>> I love entrepreneurship and I love the European culture. We're seeing a lot of entrepreneur successes that aren't in the US and so you're seeing this democratization where digital culture is we're all connected. Electronic is infinitely scalable technology, so founders can be anywhere, capital markets can flow. So, I think there's going to be a resurgence of collaboration globally.

>> Exactly. - I saw here at the hackathon,

>> at the RAISE Summit, the winners weren't even here.

Romain Mombert

>> They were in Hungary, right? It's like, "Okay. " They flew here to get the trophy. So, I mean this is the culture. You don't have to be in Silicon Valley, but because you can connect to it first party and this is the new networks being built, these trust networks. So, I have to ask you about some of the investments because you've got some winners, Mistral's one.

Romain Mombert

>> Yeah. - You just recently put capital into Neo4j,

>> a company we've been covering. Talk about that investment. What was the motivation? What was the thesis there?

Romain Mombert

>> Very happy to cover this one, because that was our first step in AI and at the time it was 2020 and I had met Emil, the CEO, and it was this Swedish engineer who had in mind that you could get much more value from the data if you represent it as a graph natively than rows and columns. And it sounded a bit crazy to me, but then I started to dig in and talking to customer and starting to realize how important connected data will be. Specifically as AI was starting to kick in, and I remember putting in our IC memo at the time. A quote from Bob Muglia who was at the time CEO of Northlake, and he was saying, "By 2030, most of AI workload will be powered by a knowledge graph. " And so to me it really kicked in and I was like, "Okay, so there is a big upside scenario. " Which is AI kicks in and this capability to create interconnected data and interconnected brain will suddenly become a must and that's what the team has been executing on and what he's getting us super excited about.

>> Yeah, and what I love about,

>> I mean I've been following Emil, everyone knows I'm a huge fan of graph databases, because I saw that over a decade ago because graphs are how data should be represented. Now, if you're a database person, you'd be like, "Well, I could just have a pointer to tables. " And that's what Ben Waugh said yesterday on theCUBE when he talked about graphs. But I think that's just, and I was talking to Philip who's the CTO of Neo4j. He and I were riffing on that at dinner, but that's just the mindset of he's just a database guy, that's his view. So, you have that dogma to the way you grew up, but I think if you look at the success of native AI at scale, it's graph, it's graph of graphs. You're starting to see more infrastructure and algorithms moving through graphs now better. So, the startups are the proof point at the end of the data's customers. Exactly. You're starting to see that evidence. All right, so what other investments have you put in Neo4j good?

>> Yeah. - Mistral said that you've one.

Romain Mombert

>> One very interesting company in AI is Cognigy.

>> They are the leader in conversational AI from Europe.

Romain Mombert

>> So, it's a competitor to the Sierra for instance, of this world in the US, but they've been relentless in focusing on creating the best possible automation platform for conversation. And they are able to automate up to 80% conversation on millions of conversation for the biggest airlines, biggest insurance company you can think of around here. And they're having tremendous growth and ride. And yes, it's a company based in Düsseldorf and highlighting again, all those gems that you can find in Europe. And actually for us as investor are interesting because we can invest that valuation that are more easily to back than in the US. So,

>> Yeah, I think the latest stage investments is good strategy, because you can jump on category winners, you have visibility, maybe pay a little premium if they go public, if the valuations are within a range, you can do the math on that. I think the magic for you and the investors going forward will be the seed deals and series A as the unification of the entrepreneurship comes together and rallies around this OpenAI system that's being built and all the enablement if the governments get out of the way and let everyone do their thing, that's going to be a huge opportunity. What's your thesis on that? How are you looking at deals? Assuming steady state things are going to continue? Market's great, I think the market's going to be great for at least another two years. IPO window's opening up more, we're seeing Q4, Q1, 2026 is predicted to be a big IPO year, which means anyone in a series B plus is in line for IPO.

Romain Mombert

>> Yeah, I mean I've learned how to be very patient with IPOs. I think you know our first vintage we started to deploy in 2015 and we still are waiting for those IPO today, so it's going to come up, but the Doctolib, Dataiku, so you have to be patient and I think we have a great leadership on that. That people that worked as a public investor and so we're not so focused on the IPO. I think it's more about building great-

>> Well, the IPO's coming,

>> but that means you have to an active investment so you have a portfolio that's ready. - ...

Romain Mombert

>> yes, we have a portfolio that's ready, but on top of that, as you say, there is this newer generation of very fast-growing company that can create new categories in AI and that will create a new cohort of very high quality businesses.

>> I guess my question, Romain is different. Let me rephrase.

>> Yeah. - What is your investment thesis now

>> as you write checks and deploy capital?

Romain Mombert

>> As you look at the landscape and evaluating deals, what do you look for?

Romain Mombert

>> Yeah, what do we look for? So, we're looking for, I think if I focus on AI, because that's the thing today. We're looking first for defensibility at the core, which is not easy to find, at least at the growth stage, because you see how things are moving fast. The cursor of this world, Windsurf getting acquired by OpenAI. So, either you invest early and you get acquired quickly or you might also get disturbed by the models. So, for us it's about very high-value use cases. So, our last investment we made, it's not announced yet, is in robotics, typically because here we see much more barrier to entry because you need to get the right marriage between the hardware and the software and so we see increasing amount of that in the pipeline. So, actually our pipeline has shifted a bit. We didn't use to do robotics at all, but now this is .

>> AI enables different capabilities.

Romain Mombert

>> So, that's what we're seeing and we're expecting that this vintage will actually have a very different composition than our prior vintage that was a lot of marketplace and FinTech and now it's more going to be AI and robotics. So, it's super exciting.

>> Physical AI is the hottest category right now,

>> it's because it's obvious.

Romain Mombert

>> And another thing that we cover a lot here in Europe and really matters is what we called climate solutions. And so we invested also in EcoVadis, it's the largest ESG scoring platform globally and we see if you can combine AI with use case around climate, I think that's something that's also very .

>> And check sizes that you like to write. Can you just give a range?

Romain Mombert

>> Yeah, absolutely. - What's the normal check size?

Romain Mombert

>> 20 to 100 million. We come in generally with a 50,

>> 60 million check and then we can re-up and we tend to be pretty long-term focus.

>> You're a good guy to know. I like those check sizes.

Romain Mombert

>> Yeah, I mean- - That's a good

>> number. - ...

Romain Mombert

>> we hope we'll be able to do even more in the next vintage

>> and continue to grow, but we're very .

>> It's a nice area because you really got to be smart too in that and that's an area where it's going to go. So, you're at a good point, good valuations, but size enough where the skin in the game.

Romain Mombert

>> Yeah, exactly. You need to be also patient and cold-minded. Especially right now when you see things are going so fast, because in a gross fund you cannot do so many bets. It's more concentrated portfolio, but yet again, the quality of entrepreneur, the quality, the robustness of the business has never been as good in Europe. So, I think it's going to be a great .

>> I think the economic opportunity is huge for Europe

>> and I'm a big believer in just let things roll a little bit. Don't get too sovereign. Don't try to solve the sovereignty problem 100%.

Romain Mombert

>> Yes. - The degree of difficulty high.

>> It's yeah. - You can

>> still, sovereign cloud and...

Romain Mombert

>> Sovereign cloud first, do that. That's an easy one.

>> Yeah, it's a good .

>> Sovereign AI is just a little bit

Romain Mombert

>> abstract, it's not clear. I'd put that in the back burner for Europe. That's my recommendation. But sovereign cloud, there's demand and that's technical, right? That's not just some more political. So, I think that's a great way to start and I think let entrepreneurs run.

Romain Mombert

>> Exactly, I think that's the- - All right. Romain, thank

>> you- - ... that's the final word. - ... very much for closing us out.

>> Thank you so much. - Closing us out here-

Romain Mombert

>> Thank you, John. - ...

>> for the RAISE Summit.

>> I'm John Furrier, two days coverage in the books.

Romain Mombert

>> Thanks for watching.