Access to investment in late-stage private tech companies like Databricks, Stripe, Antropic, SpaceX, xAI, Anduril or OpenAI has typically been reserved for institutions and a select few insiders – but Blue Chips is changing that.
Founded by Alexandre Berriche (Fleet) and Olivier Moccafico (Opportunity Ventures), the community allows a broader set of investors to participate in exclusive secondary and primary investment deals in the world’s most valuable tech companies.
Their partnership brings together Olivier’s decade of experience in secondary tech deals, and Alexandre’s extensive network and well-established reputation as one of the most active Business Angels in France and Europe.
On Roundtable, the duo has built a private, highly engaged community of entrepreneurs, VC investors, and investment bankers. The platform enables them to move fast, onboard investors easily, and offer flexible investment vehicles, all the while offering access to some of the most exciting private deals on the market – with full transparency and minimal friction.
Key takeaways:
- Blue Chips allows private investors to access exclusive primary and secondary deals in pre-IPO market leaders that generate billions in revenue, like OpenAI, SpaceX, Stripe, Antropic, xAI, Anduril and Databricks.
- The community offers members high-growth opportunities with shorter liquidity timelines, often around three years.
- With Roundtable, the team can quickly onboard investors and manage KYC easily. The platform’s community features and responsiveness, along with the ability to create investment vehicles under French or Luxembourg law, have made it central to Blue Chips’ operations and gives them the flexibility to match each deal’s requirements and investor profiles.
Roundtable: What’s your background, and how did you decide to launch Blue Chips together?
Olivier Moccafico: I’ve spent about ten years in private equity, mostly specializing in secondary transactions with late-stage tech companies. I started out at an independent bank where I developed a platform called Pre-IPO, working on deals with Spotify, Pinterest, and Palantir, among others. Alexandre has always followed me on these deals as an investor.
I also founded Opportunity Ventures, which is my own late-stage tech investment business, operating deal-by-deal and investing in blue chip companies, i.e. market leaders. Opportunity Ventures primarily serves family offices and institutional investors with larger ticket sizes. Together with Alexandre, we decided to create Blue Chips to democratize access to these same types of late-stage tech deals but for private investors. Alexandre, in parallel to that, launched Fleet, a French startup in IT hardware.
Alexandre Berriche: We have a very strong partnership: Olivier has over ten years of sector expertise, he knows the ecosystem inside out and has access to strategic partners. As for me, I’m a very active investor with a good reputation; the community started with people I knew personally and has grown from there.
In fact, reputation is key for us. We would never take reputational risks, which reassures our members.
Roundtable: What is the investment thesis of Blue Chips?
Alexandre Berriche: The community is called Blue Chips for a reason. In finance, it’s an expression for the best “chips”, i.e. the best companies in every category. In the stock market, this used to mean Nestlé, Coca Cola, Microsoft, Nike, Apple, Nvidia etc.
What we offer is access to late-stage Blue Chips like OpenAI, Stripe, SpaceX, Anduril, Databricks, xAI and more. We focus almost exclusively on these top-tier companies that define their respective markets. The level of interest has been strong, with multiple LPs investing across several of our vehicles — building diversified portfolios within this asset class and demonstrating growing confidence in our strategy.
Roundtable: Is Blue Chips focused only on secondary investments?
Olivier Moccafico: Not always. We do both primary and secondary deals.
The secondary strategy is often more accessible, since any investor can participate, unlike some primary rounds that are reserved for top-tier investors. For example, with Anduril, the primary round was preempted by Founders Fund and Lightspeed, and wasn’t open to many others.
That’s why we often do secondaries, but recently we’ve been able to participate in the last two primary rounds of OpenAI, as well as Databricks. We can access primary deals when we’re invited in.
Alexandre Berriche: Our first investment in OpenAI was when the company had a valuation of $87 billion, and now it's valued at over $500 billion.
Olivier Moccafico: So, that’s already a 5x gross, before fees / dilution in just over a year.
In almost all our positions, we’ve already seen a return. For example, with Databricks, we entered at $70 and $90 billion, and today it would be $120–130 billion on the secondary market. These are high-performing companies with regular secondary activity, which makes it easy to track the value of our positions.
It’s important to note that our investment thesis focuses on late-stage companies that dominate their industries and have significant scale; these are typically companies generating billions in revenue and growing rapidly.
Our goal is to offer our investors a quick rotation on their positions: we don’t aim to stay in these companies for ten years. We generally target liquidity events within about three years, although the timing ultimately depends on IPO market conditions.
Roundtable: Do you specialize in certain industries, or do you prefer to keep a broad scope?
Olivier Moccafico: We’re fairly agnostic, but we follow major trends. We’re quite invested in AI, space, and defense. There are some sectors we avoid, like healthcare, biotech, and medtech, which aren’t really our areas of expertise. Otherwise, we stay pretty open and try to select the one or two winners in each industry.
Roundtable: Can you tell me more about the Blue Chips community?
Olivier Moccafico: The community is made up mainly of private investors, many of them entrepreneurs with a strong interest and solid understanding of the tech sector, and generally risk-tolerant, seeking exposure to innovative, high-potential opportunities in late-stage technology leaders.
Alexandre Berriche: We also have VC investors, investment bankers, and people from the tech ecosystem who strongly believe in the idea of indexing to the top companies, such as OpenAI, SpaceX, and others. Ultimately, this approach makes sense to a lot of people.
Roundtable: Are your investors primarily based in Europe, or is the community more international?
Olivier Moccafico: It’s an international mix, really. Most of our investors are based in Europe, but we also have members from the Middle East, India, and Asia. Overall, it’s a very diverse community.
Roundtable: Why did you choose to run the community through Roundtable? What made you decide to use the platform?
Olivier Moccafico: I’d already used other platforms, including Vauban (UK), but the UK structure and jurisdiction didn’t really work for our (mainly European) investor base. The cost was another factor and Roundtable was more competitive.
To sum it up, there are a few key benefits to using Roundtable:
- The ability to create vehicles under Luxembourg or French law depending on our investors,
- Easy onboarding and a lean process,
- The Community tool, which allows us to easily communicate around our investment strategy with our investor base.
It’s very useful to have the Community tool, coupled with the onboarding and KYC processes, rather than having to cobble together other tools separately. But, in fact, the real differentiating factor is the communication capabilities, which are very important to us in the context of our community. Plus, the possibility to offer accessible ticket sizes helps, as well, as it enables us to reach a part of our investor base that we couldn’t engage otherwise.
Roundtable: Could you tell me more about your use of the platform? What’s your overall experience with it?
Olivier Moccafico: It’s really straightforward and flexible. Setting up a deal only takes a few minutes and is very easy to do. The client onboarding is smooth and efficient.
But, most importantly, the Roundtable team is extremely responsive and easy to work with – if we encounter any issues, they’re most likely resolved in a matter of hours.
Alexandre Berriche: I’m also a personal investor in Roundtable, so I support their success, and I’m happy to have built this community with Olivier and to grow it with others. It’s really rewarding to contribute to the development of the platform.
Roundtable: Have you received any feedback from your investors about Roundtable? What’s their experience been like?
Alexandre Berriche: Yes, it’s going well for them and everything runs smoothly.
Olivier Moccafico: I’ve never had any negative feedback from anyone. In fact, a lot of investors invite others to join deals and use the platform. Their feedback has been very positive, both for Roundtable and for our community and the deals we offer.
Plus, every time we share ideas or feedback with the Roundtable team, they integrate it in the platform very quickly. As a product-driven company, feedback is essential for them and they adapt to it very quickly, which is quite different from what we can sometimes see on the market.
Roundtable: What advice would you give to other community leads who want to get started?
Alexandre Berriche: Just go for it – on the platform, it’s not difficult at all. Obviously, you do need a unique angle or a differentiated value proposition, but Roundtable is really easy to use.
Olivier Moccafico: There's a growing appetite for deal-by-deal investing. Unlike with a diversified fund, investors get real visibility on the underlying asset and feel more involved in the process. To run a community, you need to find your angle, and then just get started – the platform is free and you can start without paying anything.
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