An operator turned investor.

Seventeen years building, operating and securing information systems shaped one conviction: at the earliest stage, what technical founders lack is not only capital. It is a peer who has already walked into the same walls.

Eleven of those years were spent at Accenture Security, up to Security Senior Manager, leading the Products industry for France and a team of more than 130 people. Long enough, facing CISOs and executive committees, to know which problems are real, who pays for them, and which solutions have already failed.

Those eleven years were not spent on cybersecurity alone. The Products industry means manufacturing, consumer goods, retail and life sciences: the organisations whose buyers, budget cycles and inertia Menlo knows today. Knowing how a thirty-thousand-person group decides, budgets, runs and then buries a software project applies well beyond security.

Menlo was created to be that partner: a pre-seed cheque when the technical conviction is there, an Advisory Board seat when support is worth more than capital, and in both cases a long-term commitment with no imposed exit date.

Menlo is not only an investment vehicle. It is the holding company of Purcept, a cybersecurity consulting firm supporting organisations from governance to operations. It is also one of the three co-founders of Mindlapse, a SaaS platform connecting cyber governance to operational reality through AI. We invest in fields we operate in ourselves.