Newsletter - December 2025
Welcome to the 22nd edition of the AFI Ventures’ newsletter.
As a reminder, AFI Ventures (fund managed by Ventech) is an impact VC fund that invests in pre-seed/seed startups with a strong environmental and social ambition, producing a systemic change. We invest once a month in France & Europe tickets ranging from €250K to €500K.
Each month in this newsletter, you’ll find:
🔍 A focus or key resources on an impact-related theme
📰Our Top must-read articles on the impact ecosystem🌱 Even more news from the AFI: public fundraisings, portfolio updates, and (new) where we’ve been spotted (at events) & where you can catch us next, plus a job board featuring open roles at our amazing startups.
More insights, more opportunities, more ways to connect. Let’s dive in! 💚
🔍 Focus on… wrapping up 2025 at AFI VenturesIn 2025, AFI Ventures completed 8 new investments, fully aligned with our impact-driven investment thesis across social and environmental challenges.
This year, we notably backed:
🏫 Ed.ai boosts student academic success by enhancing teachers’ performance with an AI-powered assistant.
💉 Diappymed offers EkiYou, an all-in-one digital solution simplifying insulin management for Type 1 & Type 2 diabetics.
🌞 Enrise aims to enable companies and commercial buildings transition to solar self-consumption across all their sites with no CAPEX or expertise required.
💡 Nepsis provides EPCs with an embedded financing solution for their small-midsize B2B projects. It provides lenders qualified, scored and newly profitable projects that are Ready-To-Build.
🚘 Qivia aims to empower professional fleets to transition towards low-emission mobility by combining deep data insights with cost-effective operational tools.
🧑⚕️ Annette provides medical and behavioral support for weight loss using GLP-1 medications, tailored to the needs of patients struggling with chronic obesity.
🪨 Co-Reactive develops a proprietary technology transforming CO₂ into high-value cement materials using a continuous mineral carbonation process.
📖 Blify orchestrates AI agents capable of training managers in real time thanks to an AI-assisted experience, directly integrated into their daily communication tools (Teams, Slack).
👉 And there’s more: two additional investments have already been completed, but cannot yet be disclosed… stay tuned.
Looking ahead to 2026, our ambition is to further accelerate investments over the coming years, while staying true to our core mission: backing high-impact companies delivering measurable social and environmental outcomes.
📥 If you’re an entrepreneur and want to start a project, please send us an email at dealflow@afi.ventures.
📰 Top must-read articles — What Caught Our Eyes This MonthClimate Change
China has commissioned the country’s largest battery energy storage system, adding several gigawatt-hours of capacity to stabilize its power grid and absorb surging renewable generation—underscoring how large-scale storage is becoming a strategic pillar of China’s energy transition, said Lenergeek.
Sodium-ion batteries could cut reliance on scarce lithium/cobalt while improving cold-weather performance, fast-charging and fire safety—but lower energy density and shorter lifetime mean they’ll likely complement (not replace) LFP/NMC, with scale-up expected from 2026 and first use cases in light mobility and storage, said MAC4EVER.
Megafires are getting harder to predict as climate change drives rapid wet-to-dry swings that first boost fuel growth then dry it into tinder—Australia’s 2019–20 fires were primed by severe drought and ignited by dry lightning, and some forests are now seeing repeat high-severity burns in ~4 years versus a typical 10–30-year gap, said The Conversation.
Sustainable production and consumption
Industrial process efficiency is becoming a strategic necessity in Europe as structurally higher energy costs push manufacturers to optimise existing assets—despite 75% of plants being fully sensor-instrumented and 34% having advanced process control, only 63% of those systems are actively used, leaving AI-driven optimisation a potential $1T productivity lever by 2030, said SET Ventures.
Biosourced materials are moving from niche to industrial mainstream as packaging, automotive, aerospace and construction look to replace fossil-based plastics with renewable alternatives—yet scaling and cost competitiveness remain the main hurdles, said L’Usine Nouvelle.
PFAS-contaminated soils are becoming a major bottleneck for construction and earthworks—pushing the industry to shift from landfilling “impacted” earth to regeneration pathways, where wet soil treatment is presented as the most effective readily available option to separate contamination and recover reusable materials, said France Média Business.
Meta’s acquisition of Chinese-born AI agent Manus—after Benchmark’s $75m bet and the company’s move to Singapore—shows Big Tech’s race to own “generalist agents” and subscription AI (and to plug them into Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp), while reigniting antitrust and US–China tensions, said Le Monde.
Health & Social Changes
As development aid and public budgets tighten in LMICs, a McKinsey Health Institute report argues that well-designed public–private partnerships can help scale digital health to expand workforce capacity and cut system costs (up to ~15%)—but only if engagement models are tailored to each country’s context, said McKinsey Health Institute.
As more vulnerable teenagers start using conversational AI as a judgment-free confidant—French special-needs teacher Florence Colafrancesco warns that hotline pop-ups aren’t enough in real crises and calls for a “trusted alert” system that would notify a pre-designated adult only when the AI detects immediate self-harm risk, said Le Monde.
At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed autonomous vehicles as the next breakout market for robotics—unveiling Nvidia’s ambitions to power self-driving systems with dedicated AI models and platforms, said Isabelle Chaperon in Le Monde.
🍃 AFI Ventures HighlightsRecent News from our Portfolio
🎅 Low news volume, high momentum !
December was all about holidays, year-end wrap-ups and… building behind the scenes. Our startups are now back at full speed, gearing up for a strong 2026 with several exciting projects in the pipeline.
Talent Wanted: Our Startups Are Building the Future
Internship – Operations Manager, Business Developer
Full time – Business Developer, Sales Administration Officer – Alpagga (Paris)
Full time – Full Stack Engineer, Software Engineer – Bohr Energie (Toulouse)
Full time – Downstream Process Manager, Fermentation technician – Dionymer (Bordeaux)
Internship - Electronics / Embedded Systems Engineer, Battery Modelling & State Estimation, Battery R&D and Testing Engineer
Full time - R&D Engineer/PhD Li-ion Batteries – Entroview (Nanterre, Paris)
Full time – Sales Manager, Account Manager – Estuaire (Paris)
Internship – Cell Media formulation Internship, Cell Biology & Process Engineering, Bioprocess Engineering – Faircraft (Paris)
Full time – Data & Cloud Engineer – GreenPraxis (Marseille)
Full time – General practitioner – Kor (Paris)
Full time – Senior Sales Engineer – Moonwatt (Diemen)
Full time – Account Executive Mid-Market, Full Stack Engineer, B2B Marketing Manager, Lead Health Prevention Offering – Build & Partnership, RevOps – Paladin (Paris)
Internship – Right Hand CEO – Prolong (Paris)
Full time – Account Executive, Senior Full Stack Developer – Prolong (Paris)
Full time – Head of R&D – Revcoo (Lyon, remote possible)
Internship – Engineering Students Graduating Soon
Full time – Technical Operations Manager (Oman), Automation Engineer – Sirona Technologies (Brussels)
Events
🎄 December was a quiet one on the events front. Instead, here’s where you’ll be able to meet the AFI Ventures team in 2026!
Where to meet the AFI Ventures team in S1 2026:
Tech&Fest (Grenoble, 4–5 February 2026) — Grenoble-based innovation festival bringing together startups, corporates and researchers around frontier technologies and industry.
Occitanie Invest (Toulouse, 9 March 2026) — Curated investor–startup meetings and fundraising-focused convention for high-growth companies in the Occitanie region.
ChangeNOW (Paris, 30–31 March & 1 April 2026) — One of the world’s largest events dedicated to solutions for the planet, gathering impact-driven startups, corporates and investors.
Energy Tech Summit (Bilbao, 15–16 April 2026) — European conference focused on energy and climate technologies, with a strong emphasis on investment and dealmaking.
HackSummit (Lausanne, 22–23 April 2026) — International climate deeptech event in Lausanne connecting founders, operators and investors building resilient technologies.
HTGF Family Day (Berlin, 11–12 May 2026) — One of Europe’s largest startup ecosystem gatherings, centered around curated one-on-one meetings between founders and investors.
VivaTech (Paris, 17–20 June 2026) — Europe’s flagship startup and technology event in Paris, bringing together startups, corporates, investors and global tech leaders.
🗣️ Feel free to reach out if you’d like to connect onsite!
🤝 Our TeamCharles Fourault - charles@afi.ventures
Constantin de Chaudenay - constantin@afi.ventures
Sarah Laznowski - sarah@afi.ventures
Alexandre Bérenger - alexandre@afi.ventures
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re an impact entrepreneur or just interested in any of these topics. 🍃