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Liautaud joins Balderton Capital

Bernard Liautaud, the French founder of Business Objects, a software company that sold for £3.3bn ($6.4bn) this year, has joined Balderton Capital, the London-based venture capital investor.

Mr Liautaud sold Business Objects to SAP, the world’s third-largest business software group, in January.

His remi t as general partner will involve investing across the technology sector, primarily in Europe. “I’m interested in building large companies, not just build start-ups fast and sell them to US companies or other large entities,” said Mr Liataud.

“My belief is that Europe has been underinvested in many ways,” he added. His first appointment is to the board of GDCM, a new Balderton investment whose software helps reduce data centre power consumption.

He also said he would be particularly interested in companies delivering software to businesses “on demand” over the internet.

Mr Liautaud joins partners from Goldman Sachs and the former chief executive of Esat Digifone, the mobile provider that became O2 Ireland, at Balderton, which split from its Californian partners in Benchmark Capital a year ago.

Mr Liautaud sounded a cautious note on the wave of online start-ups branded Web 2.0 that are yet to find a successful business model.

“It’s clear that having lots of people coming on to your site doesn’t bring much unless you can monetise it,” he said.

“In general Web 2.0 companies suffer from getting to a scalable revenue model. Very few of them have found a formula.”