FDJ UNITED Ventures: €110M Corporate Fund Backs Early-Stage Startups

FDJ UNITED Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of European gaming group FDJ UNITED, manages €110 million. Its mission is to spot, fund and support startups that can help the group innovate.

The fund invests directly at an early stage, with target tickets between €200,000 and €3 million. It usually takes a follower position and focuses mainly on Europe and the United States. The decisive criterion is the potential for collaboration with the group's business units. "We invest mainly in startups with which FDJ UNITED already works or plans to work," says Pierre Brousseau, head of the fund. Teams, technology and growth potential are also assessed.

The fund is generalist and covers six verticals, from games and betting to tech for good, digital acceleration, new technologies such as AI, retailtech and fintech.

An Operating Manager after the deal

To make synergies happen, the fund recently hired an Operating Manager, Guillaume Pernette, an internal profile who has worked in the startup world and knows the group well. He identifies collaboration opportunities, organizes introductions and structures use cases, proofs of concept and experiments, so startups can test their products in real conditions. Brousseau sees this as the edge of a CVC over traditional VC funds.

Portfolio examples

The fund invested in Random State in July 2025. The lottery game studio was selected by the European Lotteries Alliance (LEIA), and FDJ UNITED's International Lottery unit uses its platform for its first two games on the US iLottery market.

Sopht, which announced a €7.5 million Series A in June 2026, works with the group's IT department on measuring the digital environmental footprint. Prelude, a identity verification and anti-fraud specialist that raised $20 million in Series A in May 2026, is involved in the group's consultations and tenders.

Some bets are more exploratory. In July 2026 the fund took a minority stake in ProphetX, a prediction markets platform founded in 2018 and a rival of Kalshi and Polymarket, in a Series B. Brousseau says the aim is to better understand a new market in the industry rather than to collaborate.

Since 2015, more than 500 startups have been supported directly or indirectly in Europe, over 300 of them in France, along with more than 4,000 jobs. In 2025, 177 French startups worked with FDJ UNITED for €33 million in purchases, or 5.2% of the group's French purchasing.