While US and UK tech companies were sweating cold after the sudden bankruptcy of California’s Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), what about the sector in France?
“We ran the risk of getting hit, but luckily things picked up over the weekend,” Jean-Marc Patouillaud, Partech’s chief executive, told BFM Business on Monday night. Partech is a transatlantic venture capital fund specializing in technology.
He notes that SVB has little presence in continental Europe and almost “totally absent” in France.
Augustin Sayer, co-founder and managing director of UFO Venture Capital, shared a similar view Tuesday morning on BFM Business: “I don’t fear contagion for France.”
Back to bankruptcy of SVB
The California bank was closed last Friday. The biggest US bank failure since the 2008 crisis, the establishment specializing in financing technology companies has failed to raise enough capital to meet the demands of its clients who wanted their money back. A sister company, Signature Bank, was also shut down two days later by US authorities.
Concerned that they could not recover part of their deposits in SVB, young technology companies asked for help this weekend, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. The governments of both countries have responded by assuring customers that they will be able to recover their deposits in full.
In the UK, HSBC also bought the English branch of SVB for a symbolic pound.
Source: BFM TV
