In January 2022, Laetitia Gazel Anthoine will celebrate her first year with the Altavia Group. It’s been an exciting year at the head of Altavia Coach – now Altavia Adventures –, where this CentraleSupélec engineering school graduate remapped its scope and mission, alongside Sarah Gaïsset, Delphine Smadja and Thomas Sillé.
As the fifth of six children, Laetitia Gazel Anthoine wanted to carve out her own path very early on, and always liked to decide how her life would turn out. After several years spent at the mobile operator Orange, at the beginning of the mobile Internet, in 2007, Laetitia Gazel Anthoine created Connecthings Paris. In 2015,she moved to New York with her husband and four children to develop the North American market. The company, renamed HEROW in 2018, is a Location Intelligence SaaS platform for mobile applications leveraging location data and AI. The company raised €17 million from European VCs and was acquired by Xerys in March 2020.
An opportunity not to be missed
It was through the intermediary of Daniel de Botton, owner of HEROW’s premises in Paris and a member of the Altavia Group’s board of directors, that Laetitia Gazel Anthoine got to know Raphael Palti, Founder and CEO of Altavia. Over the course of 5 years, Palti would be a member of HEROW’s Strategic Committee. “In 2020, I sold my company to an investment fund and returned to Paris. Raphael Palti asked me to join his Group and take over the management of Altavia Coach. This time, I had to be on the investors’ side… and I really liked this challenge! “
“Scouting” startups close to Altavia’s core business and supporting them
Laetitia Gazel Anthoine took up her new position on 4 January 2021 and Altavia Coach became Altavia Adventures in March 2021. A fresh dynamism gradually brought the renamed entity to life.
The team, rounded out by Sarah Gaïsset, Delphine Smadja and Thomas Sillé, was tasked with detecting startups with high growth potential, in Altavia’s fields of expertise. This means creating new business models or technologies for publishing, marketing, retail, communication, point of sale and packaging… with the common goal of creating more sustainable solutions for these industries, and identifying startups and then investing in them (always in a minority), by providing our expertise. It’s this highly specialised approach that makes the difference. “It can also happen that a startup attracts our attention, but is already too mature or isn’t looking for investors yet. In that case, we welcome it into Altavia’s Startup Community, whose dynamism is an interesting source of inspiration for our BUs”.
It’s the financial investment, but also the synergies that the Group will have created between the startups and its customers, that will contribute to the development of the companies identified. When the time comes, Altavia Adventures will sell its shares, hoping to have provided the Group with sources of inspiration for future innovations or partnerships and to have contributed to enriching its image with clients.
Participating in the transformation of the Altavia Group
In addition to accompanying and supporting startups, Altavia Adventures’ mission is closely linked to the Group’s transformation in a rapidly changing world. “We have an important and exciting role to play in Altavia’s transformation, by accompanying and confronting it, for example, with the emergence of new and inspiring business models, such as subscription or marketplace business models”.