This episode is presented by Mercury, the FinTech that simplifies how more than 200,000 businesses operate. Hello and welcome back to Equity, Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Belan and this is our Wednesday episode where we home in on a trend in the tech world

and dive deep. Today we're talking to Philippe Poterie, the Excel partner who's led the firm's investments

and companies like DocuSign, U.I. Path, and more recently, Cink and Chain Analysis.

Philippe, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Rebecca. My pleasure to be here. I'm really excited to have you on the show. Thank you Rebecca. My pleasure to be here.

I'm really excited to have you on the show to talk about all things Europe and AI and Cloud and

Sess.

You're based in London, is that correct?

But you used to work at Bessamer?

Yes, I've been in Europe for the past 13 years now at Excel.

Before moving back to London to join the firm, I spent a bit less than 10 years in the U.S. and a good part of that time was with Bessamer.

I was in their mental park office.

Mm. And so now you're focused on cloud, sass, security, enterprise IT, has the conversations around these technologies shifted very, very much in the last decade or however many years or has it kind of been similar conversations with different jargon.

So yeah, spending a lot of my time these days on

cybersecurity and AI.

Now it's been incredible in the past 13 years

to see how things have changed in Europe.

I mean when I moved to Europe in 2011, journalists were asking like when is Europe going to

generate the first unicorn? Like at the time the unicorn was not pinned but it was like when is you're going to generate the first billion dollar outcome that was the big question in

2021 UI pass was the largest software IPO globally.

And who would have said that the largest software

...