Since February 6th, our investment platform and the venture capital fund Inventures, have decided to go their separate ways. Sharing until now the same legal structure, CEO and team, the two businesses took the logical and natural decision of setting distinct boundaries between them and split into two companies to help each other move towards a clearer and more specialised path.
To do so, MyMicroInvest has not only decided to change its name to "Spreds" but has also decided to change its CEO! From now on, Olivier de Duve will lead Inventures, leaving his CEO position to Charles-Albert de Radzitzky, co-founder and previous COO of MyMicroInvest.
At 37 years old, Charles-Albert is the happy father of two children. Having studied law, he also has a degree in business creation which triggered his passion for the entrepreneurial world, leading him to the creation of MyMicroInvest.
Charles-Albert started at Fortis, where, after a traineeship that took him in six different departments, including a passage to Istanbul, he worked in the Corporate Venturing department of Fortis where he got the opportunity to take part in the investment process in young start-ups and businesses. Charles-Albert finally ended up in the Corporate Finance department, as a mergers & acquisitions and IPO advisor for various companies.
Charles-Albert left Fortis in 2010 and met José Zurstrassen (co-founder of Skynet and Keytrade Bank) and Olivier de Duve (investment banker), founders of a technological start-up and partnered up with them to offer advice to Belgian start-ups.
Six months after the start of this collaboration, they quickly realised that there was a serious lack of financing of Belgian and European start-ups. The idea to create their own investment fund quickly made sense and meeting Guillaume Desclée (who launched a micro-credit crowdfunding initiative in Brazil) initiated the idea of combining it to a crowdfunding platform. The venture capital fund "Inventures" and the crowdfunding platform "MyMicroInvest" naturally came to life.
After almost seven years spent at MyMicroInvest, Charles-Albert and the rest of the executive committee of the platform decided to take advantage of the structural change to rename the company.
Charles-Albert explains that, for a while now, he was feeling frustrated by the name MyMicroInvest, due to the fact that it led to confusion when it came to the main activity of the company. So he is very happy to move on to a new name which he believes is more inspiring and a value carrier.
"By renaming the company "Spreds" we chose to make our strategy clearer, simpler and more powerful than ever before" says Charles-Albert. Two key meanings, related to our investors and entrepreneurs, can be found behind the new name:
Diversification: we can never stress enough the importance of diversification. Even though start-up investing remains a risky activity, there is always a way to minimise the inherent risk: by spreading one's assets.
Sharing success: one of the core values of our company is sharing success. By uniting investors and entrepreneurs, we are allowing business owners to spread their wings and make their dream a reality" - Charles-Albert de Radzitzky.
Charles-Albert explains that when creating the platform, its founders defined 3 main values: Pioneering, Sharing success and Excellence These initial values were completed, after some team work, by three new ones: Solidarity, Responsibility and Driven. And today, we can also find these values in the name of the company.
Sharing success
Pioneering
Responsibility
Excellence
Driven
Solidarity
To know more about the reason behind our rebranding, please read our dedicated blog post.