Marc Simoncini

Marc Simoncini, born March 12, 1963 in Marseille, is one of the most prominent figures of the French tech ecosystem. After earning a baccalauréat and graduating from SUPINFO (École Supérieure d'Informatique) in 1984, he began his career founding early IT service companies — CTB in 1985 and the interactive/UNIX consulting firm Opsion Innovation in 1989. In 1996 he launched iFrance, one of the first French-language web-hosting and homepage platforms, which he sold to Vivendi in 2000 for €182 million.

His defining venture came in November 2001 with Meetic, which he built into Europe's leading online dating service. Meetic went public on Euronext in October 2005 at a valuation exceeding €500 million, with Simoncini remaining the reference shareholder (~20%). The business ultimately became part of Match Group (IAC). He subsequently founded Sensee, an optical e-commerce company (later sold to Acuitis), and in 2019 launched Angell, a connected electric smart bike — a venture that ran into trouble, with a first-generation recall in late 2024 and a cessation of payments in January 2025.

Since exiting Meetic, Simoncini has become one of France's best-known business angels. He founded Jaïna Capital at the end of 2009 as a family office prioritizing seed and Series A investments in innovative business models, personally investing more than €70 million. In 2019 Jaïna's investment activity converged with the Paris VC firm daphni, where he serves as a Venture Partner investing through its "Yellow" fund alongside Charles-Henry Tranié.

Beyond investing, Simoncini is a well-known media personality, serving since 2020 as a jury member ("dragon") on M6's entrepreneurship show *Qui veut être mon associé ?* (the French *Dragons' Den*). He co-founded a European internet-business school, is an advocate for animal-welfare causes, and was named an Officer of France's Ordre national du Mérite in 2022.

• Invests at seed and Series A, typically writing checks from €100k up to ~€5M through daphni's Yellow fund, with larger commitments historically via Jaïna Capital.
• Backs innovative, often consumer-facing business models — he has described prioritizing disruptive models over incremental ideas.
• Strong bias toward founder quality and ambition: as an operator who scaled Meetic across Europe, China and Brazil, he looks for entrepreneurs who think big and can execute fast.
• Sector interests span consumer internet, e-commerce/retail, digital media, healthtech, and mobility/hardware, reflecting his own operating history.
• Comfortable with bold, capital-intensive bets (e.g., Angell smart bikes), and active in education as an investor and institution-builder (Albert School).