Fil Rouge Capital, which focuses on early-stage businesses, launched its local operations in the spring of last year and has made three investments in Romania since. As social media platform eYou, a project it supported with EUR 300,000 in pre-seed funding, made its public launch this week, Fil Rouge Capital founding partner Julien Coustaury told Romania Insider more about what drew them to this venture and some of the fund’s plans for the country.

Fil Rouge Capital had been looking at investing in social media, but no project convinced them until they encountered eYou, which was developed by Bucharest-based French entrepreneurs Jasseem Allybokus and Grégoire Vigroux. The platform’s focus on fact-checking was part of a winning mix for the fund that backs early-stage ventures. “I think that this is also the essence of what venture capital is, to invest and take risks when there is nothing,” Julien Coustaury says. Meanwhile, the fund is seeing promising ideas in the pre-seed and seed stages in the country, where it seeks to increase its presence. More on this in the interview below.

What made you decide to invest in eYou?

The idea of disrupting the social network status quo was very appealing to us. As always in pre-seed stage investment, it's the encounter between an investor, the least important part of the equation, and the team. We sat down for coffee with Jasseem [e.n. Allybokus] and Grég [e.n. Vigroux]. There was no legal entity, just an idea. This is what venture capital is about. At that stage, that was it.

In our industry, you have the tangible and the intangible. You can look at a number of things ticking the boxes, and then, of course, there's the feeling. The box-ticking part was, as I mentioned, that we felt there was a need for an alternative social network, perhaps with greater European sovereignty. The fact-checking was very important to us. We cannot just let garbage flow on social networks, most of it being inflammatory and defamatory.

I was really convinced by Jasseem’s capacity to pull out a product. These days, with artificial intelligence and vibe coding, you can do much more than what you could only two to three years ago. So I was not so worried about the size of the team. I was more intrigued by Jasseem’s capacity as a CTO to pull the product. Of course, we needed the vision of a co-founder - Grég. I believed in Greg's capacity to pull that in terms of vision and execution. That's what matters: technical capacity, vision, and execution.

Was there a trigger that pointed you in the direction of an investment in social media, or did it simply happen?

It’s interesting because we've been looking for that. We've had a couple of opportunities in the past. We were never convinced most of the time about the team and their capacity to execute and have the vision. When we met here, that's when that clicked. The whole Fil Rouge Capital team was here. We all met for coffee, looked at each other, and said, ‘If we do want a social network, this is the one.’

eYou has said they’re not focused on monetization for the time being. What milestones would need to be reached before that becomes the focus?

The topic of monetization is a very interesting and important one. In fact, we discussed it last night, and we have a couple of ideas, but it is so much not the focus at this stage of the company that we will back up the company without a clear vision at the moment about monetization. There will be monetization. We need to find a way to monetize, but it's not the focus at the moment.

Do you expect it to be traditional avenues or maybe something novel?

We were thinking about something very new. As I told you, it's a super early stage and very premature to talk about it at this point, but we are trying to think about innovative ways to monetize.

How involved are you in the company?

I am as involved as the founders want me to be. We have this vision that we are interfering as little as possible. We are not the visionaries. We are the ones who are writing the checks, and we like to stay that way. When the founding team calls for brainstorming, assistance, support, or help, we are there.

It has been one year since you launched in Romania. Has anything about the local ecosystem contradicted your expectations?

In terms of deal flow, we’ve always had the vision that there could be very good deal flow in Romania for us. In that respect, this has been surpassed. We’ve made three investments in one year in Romanian companies with Romanian teams. That is out of a massive number of opportunities we have looked at.

We are super excited about the pre-seed and seed stage in Romania. We are seeing plenty of quality founders, quality ideas. Obviously, the AI wave has triggered a new breed of founders, which will give us further opportunities to invest. We are very excited about it, and we are taking further initiatives in the market, actually, to increase and improve our presence.

Can you tell us more about those initiatives?

At this point, there was an initiative led by the European Investment Fund, and we've applied for that. That would be for the creation of a dedicated Fil Rouge Capital Romanian fund.

Are there specific verticals and sectors that you are looking at?

No, we like to remain obviously software-focused. There are a few verticals that we like more than the other just because of who we are; we understand them better, but I would say the classical kind of B2B SaaS. We like marketplace very much, we think that it can be really enhanced by AI, not so much disrupted. We are always looking at super AI disruptive and totally immune to AI disruption. eYou is probably an example of what is going to be very difficult to be disrupted by AI. We are looking at some other things which are going to be AI native type of investments.

When you announced your local presence here last year, it was around the time of the rerun of the presidential elections. Today [e.n May 5] we have a confidence motion against the government. Has the political turmoil impacted your activity in any way?

Absolutely not. We are so irrelevant to the political scene. We, of course, have opinions, but in terms of business impact at this point, unless someone is telling us that we cannot do what we do here, I suppose that's the extent to which this could have an influence on us.

What one piece of advice would you give founders, other than to be bold?

To be both humble and arrogant.

(Photo: Julien Coustaury at the launch of eYou in Bucharest)

simona@romania-insider.com