A salute to our founders

This weekend we celebrated International Women's Day. This is also a great moment to salute our rockstar female founders. At Mangrove, we've always believed that incredible founders come from everywhere: different countries, different backgrounds, different cultures, different paths.. What they all share is an unwavering conviction and a deep desire to build something that lasts.

Today, we’re proud to celebrate women CEOs across our portfolio who embody exactly that: Stellar operators swinging for the fences.

Salma from Sifflet (New York and Paris).

When we met Salma and her team in 2021, it was clear to us that they were going for something big. The thesis was simple: as enterprises become more data-driven, the reliability of data is more critical than ever to business decision-making. Simply put, bad data means bad decisions. But actively monitoring and managing the underlying quality of an entire data infrastructure is an incredibly cumbersome and slow process. Sifflet’s vision was bold: to build the first end-to-end enterprise platform to automate the monitoring and fixing of data assets across the entire data stack. Data engineers spend 10x less time manually checking pipelines and more time supporting business decisions that actually matter.

What we didn’t fully anticipate back then, but Salma did, was how dramatically the landscape would shift in the coming years. With the rise of AI, enterprises could now be given the power to automate data-driven decision-making, often without a human in the loop. Salma spotted this trend early on. With the launch of Sifflet’s agents in 2025, the platform has expanded from the traditional model of reactive monitoring to what the team calls 'Agentic Observability': a system that actively monitors, catches, and fixes data quality issues. The adoption has been explosive.. Data checks and assets monitored on the platform have increased 40x in the last 6 months alone.

Laura from Red Points (Barcelona, Salt Lake City, New York).

Red Points is a special company to me as it was the first seed investment I was involved with at Mangrove, about eight years ago. She went after a gigantic market: at the time the impact of counterfeiting and piracy was already estimated at over EUR 1 trillion. The scale and sophistication of fraud already reached volumes far beyond what humans could handle manually. Laura’s conviction was to build the first machine learning driven software capable of providing an always-on platform to help brands fight back. This vision, combined with Laura’s strong operator experience, made us jump on this opportunity.

In every way, Laura has been proven right. We have now entered what the team calls the ‘Fake Era’ of ever-growing and ever fast counterfeiting, now fueled by generative AI. Fraudulent websites are up 70% year-over-year, fake ads grew 180% between 2023 and 2024, and the cost to run scalable, sophisticated scams has effectively collapsed. To give you a sense of magnitude: in 2024 alone, Meta earned an estimated 10% of its revenue, around $16 billion, from running ads for scams and banned goods.

Red Points has built the leading AI-native platform purpose-built to protect brands across the full spectrum of online threats from counterfeits to pirated content, across every pertinent medium. The platform operates 24/7 across 5,000+ platforms and networks globally. Brands love it. More than 1,300 of them have turned to Red Points to protect their most precious assets, and the company has become the undisputed global category leader - saving their clients an estimated $3.5 billion in economic impact in the last 12 months alone. And the team is only getting started..

Macy from Enstack (Manila and Bangkok).

With Macy and Enstack (60% of the team members are women as well), we made our first bet in the Philippines. Macy is one of those founders you have to back. She was the country lead for Shopee Philippines, where she scaled the platform to $1 million in daily GMV in the region. She quickly spotted a much bigger opportunity: the South Asian commerce landscape was fundamentally broken. Millions of entrepreneurs across the region were selling through stitched-together, manual workflows, taking orders via Instagram messages, coordinating payments through bank transfers, and chat screenshots. The players that took over the West, the likes of Wix or Shopify, had never cracked Southeast Asia. They just couldn't navigate the complexity of building local integrations across fragmented payment and logistics ecosystems.

Enstack gives business operators the ability to create their online storefront in under ten minutes. They have built a dense web of local integrations with partners to offer a simple unified experience, in a region where operating a business has always been a process riddled with friction. That integration layer is precisely what kept global players out of the market and what makes Enstack’s platform so powerful to merchants..

Launched in 2023 and running lean, Enstack has had an explosive start, crossing nine-figures GMV in 2024 already. After owning the Philippines, Enstack is now expanding to Thailand, where a staggering two thirds of e-commerce still happens through chat.

Virginia from Partao (Luxembourg).

One of our latest investments comes from our home base in Luxembourg: Partao. The problem they are going after is simple but massive. Heavy industries rely on machinery that must run continuously, yet sourcing expensive spare parts remains highly fragmented and inefficient. Inventory is scattered across dealers, suppliers, and secondary markets, making it difficult and time-consuming to find the right parts when they are needed most. What makes this play particularly interesting is its dual nature: buyers become sellers, as farms and dealers often resell excess inventory back into the ecosystem. Partao’s vision is to bring the internet ‘to the farm and construction sites’ through its marketplace.

Virginia brings deep operational experience from scaling global platforms. She previously served as COO DACH at HelloFresh, leading more than 5k employees, and held leadership roles at Gopuff and Amazon, where she worked on international expansion and logistics across Europe. Virginia is the perfect match for this industry: the rare combination of vision, execution and scaling experience.

Less than a year into operations, Partao is already delivering exceptional growth: seven-figure annualized GMV with healthy margins, and partnerships with tier-one suppliers and many more eager to join the platform. The team is building the infrastructure layer for the heavy industry spare parts commerce, and moving fast.

Exciting times ahead

At the end of the day, great founders come from all walks of life. What unites them is their conviction, and the unwavering ambition and courage to build something that matters. We are grateful to play a small part in these amazing ventures.

Two weeks ago, some of my colleagues invited me to celebrate the Chinese New Year with their friends from the venture industry. And for good reason: This year, the year of the Fire Horse, will be a special one. It only occurs once every 60 years, and it is viewed as a time for rapid innovation, and taking bold risks in business. Let's not miss this opportunity..

Life is awesome,

Yannick

With help from my colleague Antoine Payrar.

European VC Global Europe