Sky9 Capital, a technology venture capital (VC) firm with its roots in Asia, has opened an office in Paris, its first in Europe. The firm, which manages about $2B, has taken space at Station F, the startup campus in a converted railway depot in the French capital, and announced the move on 24 September.
The Paris office will help companies Sky9 already backs in Asia and the United States (US) expand into Europe, and will give the firm a base to partner with European founders who are building businesses with global ambitions. Besides its Singapore headquarters, Sky9 has offices in Shanghai and San Francisco.
“I am very excited about our Paris office at Station F,” said Ron Cao, Sky9’s founder and chief executive. Roxanne Varza, Station F’s director, said the firm’s arrival “strengthens the bridge between European and Asian innovation.”
From Shanghai To Singapore To Paris
Cao founded Sky9 in 2016 after a decade at Lightspeed China Partners, where he raised two of its China funds. In its early years, Sky9 was based in Shanghai and wrote cheques of $1M to $10M into seed and Series A rounds, the earliest rounds a startup raises from professional investors.
Its early bets leaned towards fintech (financial technology), social e-commerce and online-to-offline services that link apps to physical shops. One was Energy Monster, which runs shared power bank stations where people rent a charged battery from a machine and return it elsewhere. The company listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US in April 2021.
Sky9 met Energy Monster’s founders in May 2017 and backed its Series A round of RMB100M (renminbi, the Chinese currency) about two months later. Late that year, as China’s sharing-economy bubble burst, Sky9 committed to invest again and helped bring earlier backers together for a RMB200M round in November 2017. It went on to advise the company on hiring and strategy, helped it raise debt to ease its cash position during the pandemic, and Sky9 became one of its ten largest shareholders.
“Becoming a unicorn in three years and going public in four years is rapid company growth,” Cao said in a published reflection when the company listed, using the industry term for a private startup valued at $1B or more.
Among the lessons he drew were that “the timing of a strategic partnership is very critical” and that a young company can pull ahead by beating rivals by a small margin in many areas at once.
The firm raised a $200M fund in 2017, then two more totalling $440M in 2019, one for early-stage startups and one for growth-stage companies already in its portfolio. At the time it said it was aiming at Chinese internet, enterprise and deep technology startups.
Sky9’s 2019 announcement named Pinduoduo, Meituan-Dianping, Toutiao and Innolight, a maker of the optical parts that move data between servers in large data centres, among the listed companies in its portfolio. Such data centres are being built across Asia for AI (artificial intelligence), as Morning Tick reported when ADATA backed Konsts’ $30M push into the region.
Sky9 now describes itself as a global firm and says it has invested in or supported more than 150 startups in Asia and the US over more than ten years, with 16 of them listed on stock markets and 19 sold to other companies.
Why Station F
Founded by the French telecoms entrepreneur Xavier Niel, Station F opened in 2017. Sky9’s announcement calls it Europe’s largest startup campus. Sky9 says the Paris team will connect founders and investors to its global network, operating experience and cross-border opportunities.
The campus admits startups only through about 30 programmes, each run independently with its own selection, length of stay and terms. Roughly a third are run by large companies such as Microsoft, Meta, LVMH, Thales and Cisco, a third by business and engineering schools, and the rest by networks of entrepreneurs and other organisations. Station F also runs its own Founders Program, which takes a 1% stake in the startups it selects.
More than 1,000 startups join the campus each year, TechCrunch reported in 2024, when 34 of the 40 companies Station F picked for its annual showcase list were using AI. For an investor new to Europe, that puts a large and steady supply of young companies a short walk from its desk.
Sky9 has not said how much it plans to invest in Europe, which sectors it will favour or who will run the Paris office day to day. The announcement names no European deals so far, and the firm has given no timeline for its first investments in the region.
Sky9 started out backing Chinese internet startups from Shanghai. Its Paris desk now places the firm on the same campus as many of the European founders it says it wants to back.
