Partech was founded in San Francisco in 1982 as Paribas Technologies, and its European office - established in Paris in 1996 by Jean-Marc Patouillaud - eventually became the firm's center of gravity. In 2008, Patouillaud and Philippe Collombel led a management buyout that took Partech fully independent from its original bank ownership, and the two built it from there into a genuinely global platform with offices spanning San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, Dakar, Dubai, and Nairobi. That geographic reach is unusually deliberate: Partech runs dedicated Africa-focused funds backed by development finance institutions like KfW, the European Investment Bank, and the IFC, alongside its core European and US venture strategies, reflecting a genuine conviction that the next wave of category-defining companies won't come from Silicon Valley and Paris alone. The firm now manages roughly €2.5 billion across 220-plus companies in 40 countries.
No single confirmed signature exit - Partech instead measures itself by breadth and duration: 220-plus active portfolio companies across 40 countries and four continents, built over more than four decades since its 1982 founding