5 things to know about Carrefour’s approach to venture capital

With 14,000 stores in 40 countries, Carrefour is a well established retail giant. But it is also keeping up with innovation and startups, and taking a unique approach to it. Case in point: Former M&A lawyer Hélène Labaume is both its Innovation and VC Funds Director since the innovation and VC teams merged in 2022.

In an episode of the Selected podcast recorded during SIAL Paris 2024, she discussed what makes Carrefour’s take on VC different from other corporate investment strategies — with her dual role being only one of these points. Here’s what you need to know:

Making innovation scale

Carrefour engages with startups to discover new ideas, but more importantly, Hélène’s team works on making these ideas scale. For instance, a recent pilot with American startup Axiom Cloud has already been deployed in seven stores in France, where it helps Carrefour optimizes its energy consumption from cold storage. If it were to roll out to all of Carrefour’s stores around the world, “it would be one of the biggest achievements for innovation,” she said.

Don’t call it corporate venture capital

Corporate venture capital (CVC) is the usual way in which large corporations invest in startups. But according to Labaume, that term doesn’t apply to Carrefour: “We are not a CVC, but really a VC, as we have decided to partner with daphni, which is a French VC, to merge our expertise in our fields; they are experts in VC investment and we are experts in retail.” The result of this partnership is Dastore, a venture capital fund dedicated to digital retail startups.

It’s okay to work with competitors

Ida, a SaaS platform for fresh supply chain management, is backed by Dastore and has clear synergies with Carrefour, but it doesn’t prevent it from working with others. “They have pilots with competitors or they are signing deals with competitors, so it’s not an issue for them” Labaume said. It goes even further, with Labaume’s team actively connecting portfolio startups with relevant contacts internally and externally; in Ida’s case, with Accenture and Capgemini, for example.

Beyond retail

The future of e-commerce and retail is one vertical Dastore invests in, but not the only one. The other three are data and tech for ops, fintech, and impact. The data side also ties into Carrefour’s investment in AI, which is not new: The group started building its data lake some seven years ago.

While GDPR compliant, it helps Carrefour have a global view of customer journeys in stores and e-commerce, which makes for a solid base for the retailer to deploy algorithms while also exploring the potential of GenAI to improve the customer experience, and more.

Watch the full episode to find out more about Carrefour’s VC strategy and Hélène’s unique job: