Franck has been working with KELES since its early inception. He has a unique profile combining a long track record as an investor and involvement in many prominent innovations in life sciences in France and Europe.
As Venture Partner, Franck brings his extensive expertise in deep tech and healthcare. He will be a key member of the KELES Investment Committee and will also support the KELES investment team, playing a lead role in deal-flow analysis, investment decisions and fund portfolio support.
Investment experience
For the last 20 years, Franck has been an investor with several leading venture funds – including Crédit Lyonnais PE (now Omnes), Auriga Partners and Elaia Partners – with a total of c.€450m AUM and over 100 portfolios companies.
Franck joined Elaia Partners – a digital deeptech investment fund – as one of the first investors, bringing his life sciences and healthcare experience, to develop digital health investments. Under his leadership as Partner, Elaia expanded the portfolio adding thirty life sciences and digital health companies in three years.
Franck has managed teams of early-stage investors and led investment activities in dozens of startups across cell and gene therapy, industrial biotechnologies and digital health. Several of these seed investments have exited through IPO (including Median Technologies – 2011, Erytech Pharma – 2013, Amoeba – 2015) or acquisition (including PGT to Agilent – 2017, TxCell to Sangamo – 2018, Mablink to Eli Lilly – 2023).
Other accomplishments
Before his investment career, Franck joined AIR LIQUIDE in 1997 to develop medical gases as therapeutic drugs. Among others, he obtained a French market authorization for the therapeutic use of medical oxygen to treat strokes in cluster headaches. He also created a new activity focusing on air quality in industrial clean rooms based on software analysis of aeraulic flows.
Earlier in the 90s, he had been one of the early teammates of GENSET, one of the first leading French biotech which pioneered the genomics market and the therapeutic use of small DNAs and RNAs. There, he worked on the development of the therapeutic use of a catalytic RNA isolated from a human virus and played an active role in the establishment of the US-subsidiary by developing a new generation of DNA synthesizer for genome sequencing. Franck is an alumnus of l’ Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he has got a master’s degree in general virology from the Pasteur Institute and a PhD in molecular virology from Paris University.