As a fractional CFO supporting several companies, Julien Aubin has one operating principle: spend as little time as possible on anything that isn't related to building the business. That philosophy guided how he approached Atome's first funding round.
Atome itself is built on a similar idea: removing friction. The company's single workspace connects a business's emails, messages, documents, and CRM data into one place, creating a “company brain” that gives both people and AI agents full context on any topic, instantly. A no-code, agentic layer then lets anyone automate tasks on top of that data, intuitively.
For the round, Atome needed to bring together French and international business angels under one structure, which meant running a French and a Luxembourg SPV in parallel for roughly 35 investors, avoiding the tax complexity that often deters foreign investors from French vehicles. Roundtable handled both seamlessly, letting Julien spend his time on the business rather than on admin work. With the round behind them and a strong pipeline of early clients, Atome is back to raising again, via a new SPV set up with Roundtable.
Key takeaways:
- Atome connects a company's emails, messages, documents, tasks, and CRM data into one connected database, creating a “company brain” that gives people and AI agents the right context at the right time.
- To accommodate a mix of French and international business angels, Atome ran a French and a Luxembourg SPV in parallel for around 35 investors, and used Roundtable to manage both from a single location.
- As a fractional CFO, Julien's top priority was spending as little time as possible on admin work and logistics, and Roundtable was key for that: the platform provided a smooth self-service experience where investors easily found what they needed, without extra guidance from his side.
- Now raising again, Atome is once more setting up its next SPV through Roundtable, using the new funds to deepen integrations with tools like Notion and Attio as it scales go-to-market.
Roundtable: Could you introduce yourself and tell us about Atome and its mission?
Julien Aubin: Atome is a young start-up building an operating system designed to centralize all business information and tools in one place and remove silos: all your emails, your messages, your CRM data, and everything else in a single tool. Even when companies build bridges between their different tools, everything often ends up disconnected in practice.
By bringing everything together, we create the foundational layer of Atome, or what you could call the “company brain”: all the information and context about the business and its operations, available at any given moment. Essentially, the platform replaces tools like Slack and Notion, including multi-team project management with timelines and cards.
The second, agentic layer sits on top of this and is designed to let people automate any task intuitively, in a no-code way, on top of this fully integrated stack.
Roundtable: I noticed on your website that you're very attentive to data protection and hosting everything in Europe. Can you tell me more about that?
Julien Aubin: Digital sovereignty is a hot topic at the moment. Our co-founder and CTO's long-term vision for Atome is to go as far as replacing Gmail: offering sovereign, European solutions that can substitute American ones, or at least give clients that choice. Today, we connect to Gmail, since that's what everyone uses. But in the long term, we have a real vision for Europe's tech sovereignty behind what we're building; we aim to create tools that give consumers and clients a real choice.
Our data is stored in Europe, mostly with European providers, although American providers can also offer European-hosted solutions. On the AI side, since we're still a young company, we're currently working with API-based models, which are American, but our goal is to run locally as many models as possible, using open-source models on Atome's own servers, so we can properly compartmentalize the data.
Roundtable: Could you tell me about your role at the company?
Julien Aubin: I'm a fractional CFO, and I support several companies. At Atome, I helped them through their first pre-seed fundraising round. Beyond that, I handle the company's overall financial and administrative management.
Roundtable: Could you tell me more about Atome's first fundraising round, and Roundtable's role in it?
Julien Aubin: We raised around €500K in pre-seed funding, with a mix of European and international investors, mostly business angels, alongside French investors. That meant we needed an international structure, and, ideally, one that is based in Luxembourg.
We wanted to work through SPVs from the start. Ten years ago that might not have been obvious, but today it clearly is: having a cap table with 40 people is a headache.
It also made sense early on to have both a French and a Luxembourg SPV, since foreign investors generally avoid French structures, given the tax complexity. So, we had two SPVs in parallel, with about 35 investors in total, and Roundtable let us manage both seamlessly from one place.
We're currently raising again, so we'll set up another Luxembourg SPV via Roundtable.
Roundtable: How did you discover Roundtable?
Julien Aubin: I'd already come across Roundtable at another company where I was Head of Finance at the time, and we'd done a raise through the platform there. Beyond that, there aren't that many companies who provide this kind of setup and do it so well, so Roundtable was the obvious choice.
Roundtable: Did you still consider other options, or had you already made up your mind?
Julien Aubin: As a matter of principle, we did look around, but there isn't really meaningful competition. The word everyone uses right now is “seamless”, but Roundtable truly is: having a platform that covers both a French SPV and a Luxembourg SPV, with a team we'd already worked with, made our choice very straightforward. I wasn't the one making the final call, but there was no real debate about the decision.
Roundtable: As a CFO, what are your priorities when choosing this kind of platform?
Julien Aubin: Spending as little time on it as possible. Specifically, that means I want investors to find everything they need on the platform itself, without needing to get in touch with me just to confirm that everything is in order. Once we set up everything, the process should run on its own, on both sides, without any additional admin overhead.
Roundtable: Did you get any feedback from your investors?
Julien Aubin: No specific feedback, but I'd say no news is good news. In this case, for me success means everyone being able to manage everything on their own. If we'd gone through a setup with a lawyer instead, we would have had a thousand questions, and that would have eaten up a lot of my bandwidth. If nobody's talking about it, that means it's going well. And if people are willing to put their money somewhere without asking questions, that tells you it's working.
Roundtable: What was your experience with the Roundtable team throughout the process?
Julien Aubin: It was very good! The team was always ready to help. Once we're in execution, it's mostly between Roundtable's ops team handling the SPV and the lawyers, so I'm less involved at that stage. But overall, working with the team has been great, and I'd recommend it. The platform itself is also straightforward and easy to navigate.
Roundtable: What would you say are the operational advantages of Roundtable for you, whether in terms of time, money, or peace of mind?
Julien Aubin: It lets me delegate a workstream that's strategically important but, in its essence, it's logistical. Being able to do that with full confidence is genuinely valuable.
Roundtable has been a partner you know will keep things moving, who's proactive about chasing the next steps, whereas I'm usually the one who needs chasing along, whether on the company side or the investor side. It's truly a turnkey solution, and I really like that: you show up, sign, set up the deal page, and from there it basically runs itself; you just send emails.
Roundtable: Was this fundraising round a success for Atome? What are the next steps for the business?
Julien Aubin: Yes, it was definitely a success. Now we're working on developing the product. Broadly speaking, the first round funded the “zero to one” phase from a product standpoint: it financed the tech team building the product and the first piece of go-to-market work, which let us sign our first client contracts.
The second round will accelerate both product development and go-to-market. Our product is not just plug-and-play; it also requires integrations, particularly around data transfers, since we're replacing tools like Notion or Attio, i.e. CRMs and collaboration tools that hold a lot of existing data. So, a part of this round will also fund the team that manages those transitions.
Roundtable: You mentioned you already have your first clients; what are the next steps on that front?
Julien Aubin: We have about five clients signed, another five close to signing, and a solid pipeline beyond that: around fifteen more in the works. It's growing every day.
Roundtable: Do you have any advice for other CFOs, navigating a similar funding round and platform choice?
Julien Aubin: Use Roundtable [laughs]. I'm not sure I have groundbreaking advice, since usually it's Roundtable giving me advice rather than the other way around. But if I had to say one thing, it's this: keep your cap table clean and simple to manage. I think SPVs are fairly standard practice today, but I suspect many people still don't think about them early enough.
Whenever you're bringing people onto the cap table, think hard about whether you actually want to deal with a lot of small investors, and project that forward: imagine what your cap table would look like in 36 months, not just today. If you don't use an SPV and instead handle successive rounds directly, it'll quickly become unmanageable. It's much better to get ahead of that early on by using an SPV from the start.
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