Super Capital is one of the most active French clubs of business angels and an investment banking boutique, founded in 2018, entrepreneurs investing in other entrepreneurs. The team writes tickets into early-stage companies and supports later-stage founders on financing and transactions.
Like any structure that raises capital to invest, Super Capital sits on cash between deployments, and on exit proceeds that cannot be distributed immediately. That capital still has to stay safe and productive.
Super Capital’s treasury fills from two sources. Capital raised from investors sits waiting to be deployed into companies over the following months or years. Exit proceeds, once realised, cannot always be returned right away, there is a five-year fiscal lock-up that applies, which means money can arrive in year 2 and sit until year 5 before it reaches investors.
“We have cash-in when we raise funds waiting to be deployed. We have cash-in when we exit, because we can’t always distribute, there is a five-year fiscal lock-up. Sometimes we cash out at year two, and for three years the cash stays with us.”
Thibaut Gimenez, Co-founder, Super Capital
For years, Super Capital placed that cash in classic bank term deposits. The product did the basic job but offered no usable visibility on the position, and only matched inflation. The team later moved to a more modern treasury management interface, but the rates stayed in the same low range.
“We hadn’t really thought: okay, we have a few million here, can we make it work harder than a term deposit, can we find structured products, is there a real financing strategy? We just said, we want to cover inflation, so we place in a term deposit, that’s it.”
Thibaut Gimenez, Co-founder, Super Capital
The typical time horizon on these placements is six months to two years. Long enough that leaving the money at 2.5% on treasury bonds is a cost; short enough that anything involving lock-ups or long settlement is out of scope.
For Super Capital, three criteria mattered, and in a specific order:
Byzantine fit all three, and in the order Super Capital ranked them.
Super Capital allocates a portion of its treasury to a Byzantine Prime vault. The pool covers both cash flows the team manages: capital raised from investors waiting for the next deployment, and exit proceeds held under the five-year lock-up. Capital not immediately needed sits in the vault generating yield. When a ticket is called, the team withdraws what is required and leaves the rest at work.
Nothing operational had to change. No active management, no new monitoring discipline, no retooling of the admin or accounting setup. The daily visibility on the position satisfied the third of Thibaut’s three criteria without effort.
Super Capital now keeps a portion of cash that would have sat at 2.5% on treasury bonds productive in the 4 to 5% range, while preserving the ability to call capital into a deal on its own timing.
The yield difference is the direct part: roughly double on the deployed portion, in the same low-risk posture. The liquidity difference is less visible but equally useful. Term deposits and treasury bonds carry notice periods or settlement delays that force a separate working buffer to sit idle alongside the placement. Byzantine processes withdrawals in minutes, so the team can keep more of the treasury at work for longer, and reduce the share of cash held aside for purely operational reasons.
Nothing about the way Super Capital operates had to change to capture either of these.
“Security is really the key point. Then yield. Then availability, visibility, user experience.”
Thibaut Gimenez, Co-founder, Super Capital
For an investment vehicle that raises capital to deploy, the treasury between deals is not a parking lot, it is part of the engine. Every euro it earns compounds into what the team can put behind founders, and every minute saved on a withdrawal is cash that no longer needs to sit outside the placement waiting. Super Capital made both work at once: yield roughly doubled on the deployed portion, and the buffer that term deposits forced the team to hold separately is no longer required.
For any investment vehicle on the same model, a business angel club, a small fund, an advisory arm with cash between transactions, the same upgrade is available without changing how the team operates. Treasury between deals can be a working part of the fund’s economics, not a static line item.
