HCVC

HCVC is a venture capital firm that backs teams tackling hard problems with capital, resources and collaboration. It invests from pre-seed and seed through Series A and later rounds, across aerospace and defense, consumer, fintech, climate and other technically demanding categories. The firm started in 2015 as Hardware Club, a community Alexis Houssou created so hardtech companies could share the parts of the job that software investors rarely understand: contract manufacturers, component sourcing, certification paths and supplier terms. That community became an investment platform, and HCVC still runs the network as the core of its offer rather than as a marketing layer.

Its venture arm raised $28 million in 2017 and has since built a portfolio weighted toward robotics, space, semiconductors, energy and biomanufacturing, including Dyna Robotics, Renaissance Fusion, Navier, Chiral, Cosmic Robotics, Karman+, Alpine Eagle and Kyron.bio. The team is deliberately transatlantic: Houssou in Paris, general partner Aymerik Renard in Silicon Valley, partner Alexandre Flamant in London, and general partner Jerry Yang moving between Europe and Asia, which lets the firm follow European deep-tech companies as they open US operations.

What distinguishes HCVC is the combination of technical underwriting and manufacturing practicality. Its investors include a semiconductor company co-founder, a PhD stem cell biologist, and a venture partner who ran a Formula One team, and the firm treats production economics, supply chains and regulatory approval as first-order investment questions rather than post-investment problems. HCVC raises in Europe and files no US pooled-fund offerings, so fund sizes beyond the 2017 raise are not publicly disclosed.