Alexandre Dewez

Who they are

Alexandre Dewez is a Partner at 20VC — a former philosophy teacher turned hacker turned VC who publishes an annual 'State of the French Tech Ecosystem' report and a Substack called 'Overlooked by Alexandre Dewez'.

Person

Alexandre joined 20VC in September 2024 when Harry Stebbings was launching a newly formed $400M fund — a move from one of Europe's most established VC platforms into a media-native fund still building its investing identity. He came up through HEC Paris (CEMS International Business Master, 2020) with an exchange year at Stockholm School of Economics, but his backstory starts earlier: he was programming at 10, doing bug bounty hacking at 13 — finding vulnerabilities at Google, Amazon, PayPal, and Netflix — and joined ManoMano as a red-team member at 18. His formal finance career ran through M&A at Mediobanca and private equity at EDF Invest before he moved into venture at Eurazeo (formerly Idinvest), where he spent several years as a venture capitalist covering European tech. Before 20VC he also held a Head of Venture Capital & Startup Business Development role at Google Cloud. In between, he taught philosophy as an assistant professor — a detail that sits oddly in a finance CV until you read his writing, which is structural and argument-driven. He publishes a Substack, 'Overlooked by Alexandre Dewez' at alexandre.substack.com, covering venture capital, French Tech, and portfolio backing memos; his annual 'State of the French Tech Ecosystem' report, published each January, has become a reference piece. He spoke at How to Web Conference 2025 on 'Key Metrics for Efficient Sales Teams'. The through-line: someone who learned systems by breaking them first — code, philosophy, finance — before building from within.

Company

20VC's most recent move was leading a $17 million seed round in fonio.ai on 9 June 2026, at a $140 million post-money valuation — a bet on omnichannel AI for business communication, with capital earmarked for email and chatbot expansion and new offices in New York, Munich, Milan, Paris, London, and Warsaw. Two weeks earlier, on 20 May 2026, 20VC led a $20 million Series A in Prelude, a French digital-onboarding startup, to grow telecom partnerships and scale its 50-person team. The firm's portfolio unicorn count recently grew when Factory, an AI-coding-assistant startup, raised a $150 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation on 16 April 2026, with 20VC participating alongside Khosla, Sequoia, Insight, and Blackstone. As of June 2026, 20VC has invested in 87 companies, with 29 new investments in the prior 12 months — 24 of them in 2026 alone — writing checks of $100k–$10M, mostly at seed stage in UK-based startups.

Market

20VC operates in early-stage VC, primarily backing seed-stage companies in the UK and Europe, with a media-driven sourcing model — its podcast and content platforms (20Growth, 20Sales, 20Product) give it a differentiated deal-flow edge. AI startups captured 33% of total VC funding in 2026, with seed-stage valuations running approximately 42% higher than non-AI peers, a dynamic directly visible in portfolio bets like fonio.ai's $140M seed valuation. Geopolitical tensions and expanding national-security regulations — U.S. outbound-investment rules and EU scrutiny of AI and quantum tech — are raising compliance risk for cross-border AI investments, a headwind for any European-focused fund making transatlantic bets.

Network

Alexandre's most prominent named connection is Harry Stebbings, founder of 20VC, whose fund he joined in September 2024. His deal activity surfaces co-investors including Picus Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Ventures Together, and Foreword Fund on the XO Market deal. No further named colleagues or portfolio relationships are available from the current claims.

Harry Stebbings· Founder, 20VC

How they likely show up

Bug bounty hacking at 13 and red-teaming at ManoMano at 18 → likely approaches investing by stress-testing assumptions from the outside in, not accepting the founder's framing at face value.
Philosophy teaching alongside a finance and VC career → comfortable holding abstract frameworks and operational data in the same conversation; arguments will be structured, not just vibes-driven.
Active Substack with an annual ecosystem report and backing memos → writes to think, not just to broadcast; probably does the same analytical work internally before deploying conviction.
Moved from Eurazeo (institutional, multi-stage) to 20VC (media-native, seed-heavy) → chose speed and founder proximity over platform safety; likely bored by committee-heavy processes.
Spoke at How to Web 2025 on sales-team metrics → thinks operationally about go-to-market efficiency, not just market sizing; will probe commercial fundamentals in a meeting.

Conversation tips

→ Reference a specific issue of 'Overlooked' or his annual French Tech report — he'll know immediately whether you've read it or are bluffing.
→ Engage on the operational angle: his How to Web talk was on sales-team metrics, so he's not purely a top-down thematic investor — be ready to discuss unit economics and GTM mechanics.
→ His hacking background is worth a question, not a throwaway mention — it's the most distinctive part of his story and he's raised it publicly; it signals how he thinks about product security and edge cases.
→ Don't treat him as a French-market specialist only — his portfolio activity in June 2026 spans Austrian AI (fonio.ai), French onboarding (Prelude), and global AI coding tools (Factory).

Toolbox

Openers

Open on the fonio.ai seed lead — 20VC just wrote a check at a $140M post-money valuation for a voice-AI startup in June 2026, which is an aggressive price for seed; it's a concrete window into how the fund is thinking about AI-communication infrastructure right now.
Bring up his annual 'State of the French Tech Ecosystem' report — it's a named, recurring piece of public work he puts out each January, and asking what surprised him most in the latest edition signals you've actually read it.
Reference the philosophy teaching — it's an unusual detour in an otherwise finance-track CV, and pairing it with the hacker background (bug bounties at 13, vulnerabilities found at Google and Amazon) makes for a genuinely interesting question about how he reads founders.

Discovery questions

You led fonio.ai's seed at a $140M valuation in a crowded AI-voice space alongside Vapi and Retell — what made the price right given where competitors are on funding and ARR?
Your 'State of the French Tech Ecosystem' report comes out every January — what's the single metric or dynamic from the most recent edition that you think the market is still underweighting?
You went from Eurazeo, one of Europe's bigger platforms, to a seed fund built off a podcast — what changed in how you source or evaluate companies when the brand signal on your term sheet shifted?

Avoid

Don't pitch a company to him as 'under the radar' or 'overlooked' without specifics — that's literally the name of his Substack, and he'll have a sharper definition of it than you do.

Make it yours