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ISAI announced today that they have put a hard cap on their latest fund, “ISAI Expansion,” closing \u20ac50 Million, now including department store Galeries Lafayette (think French Macy’s), in addition to video media giant Groupe M6 &\u00a0Groupe Amaury among their “corporate” investors. The new fund, which will include investments between 1M-7M\u20ac (up to 15\u20ac with others involved), will put ISAI back in business, who hasn’t invested in a new startup since January of this year, when they invested in web-to-store startup Pubeco<\/a>.<\/p>\n Despite what we may have said about the ISAI investment strategy at times<\/a>, things have been going pretty well for ISAI’s investments. This year alone, Shopmium<\/a>\u00a0($5.6M),\u00a0StickyAds<\/a>\u00a0(3.1M\u20ac)\u00a0& Instantluxe<\/a>\u00a0(2M\u20ac)\u00a0have each had new rounds from new investors, suggesting promising growth. Meanwhile, star investment Blablacar has gone to expand in Benelux & Germany<\/a>, announcing 3 registered Million users in April of this year (their competitor, the German Carpooling.com, announced 5 Million users today, and has launched a partnership with Eurolines & Deutsche Bahn in order to provide real-time price comparison between ride-sharing, buses & trains).<\/p>\n These successes have no doubt contributed to ISAI’s ability to raise a new fund, normally the mark of how healthy a VC fund is doing with its previous investments. In the past year, Ventech has raised a new \u20ac75 Million fund<\/a>, as has 360 Capital Partners<\/a>, which took them a fair amount of time. Alven Capital raised a fourth fund<\/a>\u00a0at \u20ac120 Million<\/a>, and Elaia Partners launched Elaia Alpha<\/a>\u00a0last October, a \u20ac45 Million fund for early stage, while they wait on the pending Criteo IPO, of which they were the first VC investors.<\/p>\n