French startup studio eFounders just raised $6 million from Fotolia co-founder Oleg Tscheltzoff to build its next batch of software-as-a-service startups. So far, eFounders is behind five startups that are now independent — Mailjet, Textmaster, Mention, Front and Aircall. Pressking has been sold, and two startups are in the works — Illustrio and Tipi.
With today’s funding round, the company expects to launch 6 new startups over the next 18 months. As always, eFounders will find a founding team and match them with the right idea. It will give them advice, best practice as well as internal tools.
“We’ve been flying a bit under the radar for the past 4 years and half, building our projects,” eFounders co-founder and CEO Thibaud Elzière told me. “For the past year, we’ve been working on building our foundation — we now have a platform, a process.”
Unlike Rocket Internet, eFounders focuses on SaaS startups and wants to carry a startup for up to 18 months. After this initial launch, the startup should be able to stand on its two feet. So far, it’s been working well for some startups, and moderately well for others — there has been quite a bit of turnover among startup founders.
“Now that we have a platform, we don’t ask ourselves the same questions over and over,” Elzière said. “We know how to build a product, how to launch a marketing campaign… We try to reuse the same processes as much as possible so that we can focus on the core business.”
And eFounders sill has a lot of ideas up its sleeve. Illustrio will let you customize stock illustrations, such as maps or diagrams, directly in your browser. Tipi will help you manage your office, from meeting room reservations to holidays and more. eFounders is also working on a sort of Squarespace for your backoffice as well as a B2B payment solution.
For all these projects, the startup studio receives around 100 applications per month to become CEO or CTO of these new startups. While eFounders doesn’t take any revenue cut from its startups, it kept between 50 and 66 percent of the initial equity so far. This can change of course after new funding rounds.
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So what’s next beside these new startups? Elzière told me that he doesn’t plan to work with a gigantic team, and thinks eFounders’ sweet spot is a team of 15 to 20 people with a wide range of qualifications. It’s an interesting hands-off strategy as eFounders won’t lend engineers or designers to new startups. This way, when a VC invest in an eFounders startup, they can be sure that they are investing in this startup’s team, and not eFounders’.
As eFounders only generates revenue with startup exits, it will be interesting to see whether the studio can consistently create valuable companies again and again so that it can generate healthy returns.
Romain Dillet was a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch until April 2025. He has written over 3,500 articles on technology and tech startups and has established himself as an influential voice on the European tech scene. He has a deep background in startups, AI, fintech, privacy, security, blockchain, mobile, social and media. With thirteen years of experience at TechCrunch, he’s one of the familiar faces of the tech publication that obsessively covers Silicon Valley and the tech industry — his career started at TechCrunch when he was 21. Based in Paris, many people in the tech ecosystem consider him as the most knowledgeable tech journalist in town. Romain likes to spot important startups before anyone else. He was the first person to cover Revolut, Alan and N26. He has written scoops on large acquisitions from Apple, Microsoft and Snap. When he’s not writing, Romain is also a developer — he understands how the tech behind the tech works. He also has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. He knows how to connect the dots between innovations and the effect on the fabric of our society. Romain graduated from Emlyon Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He has helped several non-profit organizations, such as StartHer, an organization that promotes education and empowerment of women in technology, and Techfugees, an organization that empowers displaced people with technology.