Teampact closes €20M fund with pro athletes as LPs: 'Fundraising is an Olympic sport'

Paris-headquartered Teampact Ventures has closed its first fund at over €20m, targeting early-stage deep tech startups in climate and health – but it doesn’t have your typical LP lineup.

Some 60 athletes anchored the fund, including pro rugby player Antoine Dupont, handball champion Nikola Karabatic, and World Cup-winning footballer Raphael Varane. The sports stars also other tailored coaching for founders in Teampact’s portfolio.

“Fundraising should be a new Olympic discipline,” founding partner Benjamin Kayser told Impact Loop. “It’s a proper sport.”

Over 150 angel investors also joined in, including Index Ventures partner Dominique Vidal, co-founder of Tikehau Capital Mathieu Chabran, and Céline Remy, co-founder of sportclub chain NeoNess.

Teampact has already invested in 21 companies, Kayser said, including reforestation platform Morfo, hydrogen plane startup Beyond Aero, and Genomines, which extracts rare metals from plants. Three more investments are “due to be announced soon,” he said, with a total of 30 planned under the first fund.

Kayser has 37 caps for France, where he played hooker – one of the most physically demanding positions in rugby. But in recent years, he’s been muscling his way into the world of venture capital.

Building better teams

In 2020, Kayser founded Teampact alongside web entrepreneur Romain Vidal and investor Basile Agay. The partners aimed to leverage the lessons from elite sports – discipline, teamwork, and psychological resilience – to create stronger founders and more durable startups. Almost a quarter of startups fail because of team issues, according to a recent report by the Founders Forum Group.

Alongside an investment, the fund hosts team coaching sessions where founders can directly receive coaching from pro athletes on everything from teamwork to staying calm under pressure.

Eloa Guillotin, CEO at Beyond Aero, was one of the founders that went through the programme. “Working with [rugby coach] Ugo Mola taught us how to manage the pressure of decisive moments and build a culture of resilience,” she said in a prepared statement.

'Inaccessible dealflow'

Kayser says he believes Teampact’s unique value proposition allows it to access far more deals than such a small fund could have otherwise.

“Once we add value to the founders, the cap table, and the company, the other, larger co-investors go, ‘Oh shit, those little guys are actually really useful,’” he said. “Then they start sending us their deal flow, too.”

“We now have access to unaccessible deal flow – pretty much all the deals we want to go to,” he continued. “It takes a tremendous amount of work, dedication, and trust to build, but we believe we’re really onto something.”

Kayser admits he still carries a heavy dose of imposter syndrome. He said even world-class athletes like Dupont and Varane initially asked him, “Are you sure they need us?”