As venture capital firms invest more in B2B startups, Intuition is a new venture fund focused on consumer technology.

In 2024, it’s hard to wake up without hearing about a big new funding round in an enterprise AI company. Intuition, a new venture capital firm based in Paris, is doing something radical and betting exclusively on consumer technology.

Behind the scenes, Hugo Amsellem (photo on the left) and Etienne Boutan (photo on the right) will be the general partners of this new fund. Hugo Amsellem has worked for Jellysmack and written about consumer technology and influencers for the past few years – including this very interesting article on loneliness and how it affects consumer technology and culture.

Amsellem is also best known as one of the first employees of The Family, an iconic startup accelerator based in Paris. More recently, The Family has been talked about due to the ongoing lawsuits against its co-founder Osama Ammar. He allegedly embezzled millions of euros for his own benefit.

Amsellem left The Family in 2019. When talking about this part of his career, he is both disappointed with how things ended and wants to move on.

As for Etienne Boutan, he began his career as a professional basketball player. Before founding Intuition, he co-founded AI startup Heex Technologies.

The duo teamed up to raise an initial fund of 15 million euros ($16 million at the current exchange rate). They have already invested in a handful of consumer startups in Europe and the US after an initial close, but they continue to actively raise funds.

They also recruited Axel Toupane (NBA champion), Eliott Kessas (co-founder of Daring) and Erika Batista (general partner of On Deck Runway Fund) as venture capital partners.

“Hugo and I were among the most active early stage investors in consumer startups in Europe and with the addition of Axel, Eliott and Erika as venture capital partners, we wanted to ensure we could expand our coverage to the States -United, at the heart of consumer technology in San Francisco and culture in Los Angeles,” said Etienne Boutan.

The investment thesis for Intuition is quite simple. There is currently a lack of investment in consumer technologies. Indeed, investing in consumption and culture has always been a bit risky for two reasons.

First, it’s hard to generate revenue when you’re working on a fun mobile app or the next big social network. Sometimes it feels like you’re either working on the next unicorn or you’ll end up in Deadpool.

Second, there are a handful of consumer-focused tech companies that simply dominate: Meta, ByteDance, Snap… Of course, some big tech companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon have acquired consumer companies to turn them into big platforms mainstream like Instagram, YouTube and Twitch. But we have the impression that this acquisition window has closed.

“Working on consumer is really not cool these days, because it’s been 5-7 years of failures in the consumer sector and there hasn’t been much liquidity,” Amsellem told me .

“All the funds which have experienced these poor performances and which have had a huge amount of money to deploy because they have raised gigantic funds, they always say ‘yes, I do deals with consumers’, but they don’t. don’t say too loudly,” he added. “Actually, this is our opportunity.”

At the same time, many smart people are still working on consumer products – think BeReal, Amo, Retro, The Browser Company, etc. Innovation has not stopped and some of these companies will succeed.

And with the current pace of innovation in artificial intelligence, Intuition expects to see exciting new things happening in the space.

That’s why Intuition wants to help the next wave of consumer companies. The venture capital firm plans to invest between €100,000 and €500,000 at the pre-seed or seed stage. It will invest in more than 40 companies with its initial fund.

“There’s only one thing I want to work on, and that’s the consumer and everything related to it – everything that changes culture,” Amsellem said.

Intuition is VC + events

“I don’t think there is room for a 30 million euro consumer fund focused only on consumer products,” Amsellem said. Adding events on top of the investment will increase Intuition’s revenue, which should help the company hire a larger team and make smarter bets.

So the company wants to create a community of people working on consumer and culture so they can learn from each other and find the next big thing together.

Intuition is launching a series of co-hosted events with other key venture capital firms, such as Felix Capital (in London), a16z (in New York), Greylock (in Los Angeles) and General Catalyst (in San Francisco ). Later this year, this tour will culminate with Intuition’s flagship event at Station F in Paris on September 20.

This event strategy reminds me of Jason Lemkin’s SaaStr conferences. While SaaStr draws 15,000 people for its main conference, Intuition is only at the beginning of its journey. The new company plans to invite a few hundred people for its first events. But it’s interesting to see a venture capital firm taking consumer technology seriously again.