Fashion Capital Partners profile

Fashion Capital Partners is the first investment company dedicated to the combination of fashion and technology.

Founded late 2013 in Paris, Fashion Capital Partners is an investment company (the first of its kind) specializing in seed capital for innovative companies active in both technology and apparel. The firm has 22 partners (including Laurent Benhamou, Monelib.com founder, Frederick Bourguet, Yohan Ruso, President Praditus among others, Catherine Max, and CEO of Ebay France or Nicolas Santi-Weil, former founder of the Kooples, now Executive Director of AMI Alexandre Mattiussi brand) The company takes minority stakes in start-ups at various stages of maturity. These companies are selected based on their growth, their potential for international development, and quality of their management team, which must be "talented and multidisciplinary." The investment vehicle was created by Celine Lippi and Francesco Maio.

Fashion and technology is not just a trend. The Fashion industry experiences a time of social and technological revolution. Fashion Capital Partners is convinced that new technologies provide exceptional tools for the industry to improve processes, propose new user experience. Creativity and innovation are more than ever called upon as a potential lever for growth and sustainability of the industry.

Fashion Capital Partners is an investment company based in Paris aimed at investing in early-stage Fashion and Luxury tech start-ups and innovative high-end designers throughout Europe and in the US. Fashion Capital Partners focuses on three types of investments: Pre-seed with incubation, Seed and Growth co-funding Series A rounds.

Fashion Capital Partners mission

As Success does not happen overnight, Fashion Capital Partners focuses on helping its portfolio of companies via a hands-on Mentoring Program by sharing best practices, assisting them in all important aspects of value creation, such as strategy, business development, marketing, or finance and giving them access to its own business-development network to enable businesses to accelerate and succeed.

Fashion Capital Partners

- Invest in great, talented and visionary entrepreneurs and ideas, that have the potential to make a big impact on existing markets or even create new ones.
- Back experienced, skillful and motivated entrepreneurial teams that have a strong concept and that are looking for seed capital, but also understand the need for mentoring.
- Looking to invest in outstanding companies in social-mobile-e-commerce, advanced digital marketing solutions, user experience personalization and improvement, 3D and 4D technologies, geo-targeting mobile technologies, big data, etc, etc, etc.

Start-ups with innovative and disruptive business models aimed at revolutionizing the fashion and luxury industries are favored. FCP also invests in high-end fashion designers. Fashion Capital Partners should be able to make significant contributions to the value of the target company.

Key people:
Francesco Maio is co-Founder and CEO at FASHION CAPITAL PARTNERS
Celine Lippi is co-Founder and Managing Director at FASHION CAPITAL PARTNERS

Céline Lippi has more than 15 years experience in high tech multi-cultural environments for emerging and established markets. She has held various senior management roles in marketing for Fortune 500 companies and launched the French subsidiary of Philips Business Communications, a division which was acquired by NEC Corp. in 2006. Since 2010, as an independent consultant, she has been dedicated to advising companies in their structuring, strategic analysis and directions’ setting, etc, etc etc. In 2011, she co-founded Fashion & Technology Lab, an incubator dedicated to creative entrepreneurs and fashion start-ups. She also co-founded 2013 Fashion Capital Partners, an investment company specialized in early stage start-ups at the intersection of digital, fashion, retail and luxury sectors (disruptive creative projects, innovative retailing & commerce, big data and advanced analytics, user experience optimization,..) As a Business Angel Céline focuses primarily on investments in fashions.

Francesco Maio has over 17 years experience as an Investment Banker at various companies in Paris, the Exane company that was sold to BNP Paribas in 2004, in which he was associated. He began investing as a business angel in more than 20 start-ups (Attractive World, NowFashion, InstantLuxe, LoungeUp, Carnet de Mode, Plyce, Modizy), was the mentor Camping (Silicon Sentier Group), is also co-founder of 50Partners (acceleration, structure and investment in technology start-ups). For 3 years now, he focuses investments in start-ups related to high-end fashion and luxury.