If you haven’t heard of NJJ, it’s the family office of Xavier Niel, a French businessman with an estimated net worth of $12 billion.

His wealth was primarily created through founding Iliad SA, the fifth largest telecommunications group in Europe (brands include Free, Scaleway, Play).

Since then, he’s diversified into areas including AI and regenerative agriculture, founded 42, a non-profit peer-to-peer computer science school, and opened Station F, the world’s largest business incubator for startups.

He’s even allegedly loaned money at friendly rates to keep the legendary Harry’s Bar in Venice afloat.

For a prolific entrepreneur with a distinctive way of doing things, when it came to venture investment, it’s no surprise he took a unique approach.

Enter Kima Ventures, founded in Paris in 2010 to directly invest Xavier Niel’s personal capital into startups. We met with General Partner Alexis Robert to find out what sets the company apart from traditional venture firms.

“What’s unique is how early, frequent, and broad our investments are. We’re actually a super angel rather than a traditional VC. We are investing in two startups per week with small tickets of €100K–150K.”

“The idea was to help founders with a systematized angel model, using speed, simplicity, and high throughput to make early-stage capital more founder-friendly. That made us a bit of a UFO in the venture world—lean, contrarian, and built for volume.”

Alexis, who started coding aged eight and built companies while studying software engineering, says the approach addresses some of the problems he sees in the traditional VC model.

“If you ask me what’s broken with traditional VC, I’d say the obsession with credentials, consensus, and excessive process. Too many firms hire the same profile: MBA, ex-consultant, polished deck readers. And too few know how to talk to builders. At Kima, we wanted to be the opposite of that. No committees. No BS. Just high conviction and founder trust.”

Kima has been labeled “the most active business angel in the world” - each week, they evaluate hundreds of companies, meet with 40-50, and invest in around two to three.

Despite a high profile in the French venture ecosystem, they source only 40% of their deals through founders approaching them.

“Most of the dealflow comes through networks, existing founders, and other funds. Each GP at Kima handles their own flow; we don’t run investment committees or need consensus. If one of us believes in a founder, we write the check.”

Alexis says their approach to evaluating startups is more similar to recruitment than anything else.

“We’re not here to analyze pitch decks all day or overthink market slides. We recruit founders in interesting markets, with a simple scorecard: 80% is about whether they’re executing fast, learning fast, and showing grit and drive. The remaining 20% is about whether the idea has the potential for a disproportionate outcome, unicorn style.”

While it might initially come across like a spray-and-pray approach, Alexis says it’s anything but that: Kima supports the companies, and just as importantly, the founders themselves.

“Our support is built around one core belief: we want to be the cure for founder loneliness. We’re here when they need us, but we never get in the way. After all, we’re angels. When founders reach out, we’re often the most neutral person on the cap table, the one they can truly talk to. That’s real value, because there are things you just can’t say to your board. And too often, founders end up carrying it all alone.”

Support includes organising events to connect founders and provide space for them to openly share ideas and challenges that only they truly understand.

“Let’s be honest: when it comes to most topics, getting input from another founder is a thousand times more useful than from a VC,” says Alexis. “VCs are coaches, founders are in the arena.”

And the rewards of this approach?

“As for returns, we are around 30% IRR -  except some vintages like 2022 that were not that good for everybody. The model makes pretty consistent returns over time: it will never make 10X funds, but is pretty consistent.”

Some of the Kima success stories include investments in Deel, Carta, Wise, Pigment, Pennylane, Sorare, Pigment, Ledger, and Payfit.

That said, it’s a model that comes with its own unique challenges, especially considering they’re a team of only four.

“Scaling a high-volume investment approach means building custom tooling and automating everything we can, from accounting to reporting to wiring funds. That's why we've built custom software to automate processes and go faster, we have our own portfolio management software, and our own CRM.”

And while they operate entirely separately to NJJ family office, Xavier Niel is involved in validating the deals, opening doors and instilling an entrepreneurial spirit.  

“He gives us incredible autonomy, and his name carries weight with founders. More than anything, his approach, radically founder-first, defines the ethos at Kima.”

What does Alexis think about this approach being replicated by other family offices?

“To a family office that wants to copy Kima, it looks easy at first. But the work is essentially three things: be able to have access to deals, be able to read founders and make accurate convictions, be able to close your allocations and stay pertinent in the long term. It's a very long-term game.”

“On the first one or two, we've seen some family offices managing to crack this, by recruiting a hustling managing director for the fund. However, it's tough to recruit people that have both the hustling game, and the ability to read founders and stay pertinent in the long term.”

Over the next few years, Kima aims to enhance the value proposition they offer to their founders, but otherwise, Alexis notes they will continue to focus on the model that has proven to work for them, anchored in what they do best: “Fast, founder-first investing at scale.”