SuperNova Invest
Supernova Invest is a Paris-based deeptech venture-capital firm, founded in 2017, that invests in water only occasionally. Spun out of France's atomic-energy commission and the asset manager Amundi, it backs hard-science startups across digital, industry, healthcare and cleantech. As of 2026 it has backed one water company across two deals.
Compiled by Antoine Walter, (don't) Waste Water, from official filings and direct intelligence in Leviathan.
The take
Supernova Invest is not a water fund, and the place it was born explains why. It spun out in 2017 of CEA Investissement, the venture arm of France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, together with Amundi, Europe's largest asset manager. That pedigree makes Supernova a deeptech generalist, managing about 850 million euros across four verticals, digital, industrial technology, healthcare and cleantech, and writing cheques into hard-science startups from seed to growth. Water is one narrow corner of the cleantech vertical, not the whole map.
Supernova Invest reaches water the way a deeptech investor does, through the chemistry and the hardware rather than the utility bill. Its single tracked water company is Adionics, a French firm that pulls salt and lithium out of brine with a liquid solvent, a technology sitting where desalination, mining and the battery supply chain overlap. That is industrial chemistry as much as water treatment, and Adionics shares its investor base with Chile's lithium major SQM, the public bank Bpifrance and the water specialist Ovive. For a newcomer the honest read is that water here is a by-product of a hard-science thesis, not a dedicated water strategy.
Supernova Invest does put a genuine water specialist on that bet, which is the most interesting thing about its small footprint. Marine Glon, who leads the firm's energy and environment investing, sits on the Adionics board, and before Supernova she ran the French environment agency ADEME's future-investments programme, funding more than a hundred companies across waste recycling, biogas and water treatment. Her colleague David Hansen came up through the water-tech accelerator Imagine H2O and the leak-analytics firm Inflowmatix. So while Supernova will likely keep backing water only when the science is hard enough to interest a deeptech fund, the people reading those deals actually know the sector.
Team · 6 profiled
Water Commitment Score
Compiled from official filings, third-party records, and direct intelligence from investors and founders, in Leviathan · recomputed monthly · as of Jun 2026.
How they invest
Portfolio · 1 water companies
Invests alongside
Highlighted = profiled on (don't) Waste Water.
Frequently asked
- What does Supernova Invest invest in?
- Supernova Invest is a deeptech venture-capital firm that backs hard-science startups across four areas: digital technology, industrial technology, healthcare and cleantech. It invests from seed through growth and manages about 850 million euros. Water sits inside its cleantech vertical, where it has so far backed one company, the brine-processing firm Adionics.
- Is Supernova Invest a water fund?
- No. Supernova Invest is a generalist deeptech fund, spun out of France's atomic-energy commission and the asset manager Amundi in 2017, not a dedicated water investor. (don't) Waste Water rates its water commitment Occasional: one tracked water company, Adionics, reached across two deals, with no rounds led.
- What water companies has Supernova Invest backed?
- Supernova Invest has backed one water-related company in our database: Adionics, a French deeptech firm that extracts salt and lithium from brine with a liquid solvent, a technology spanning desalination and the lithium supply chain. Supernova invests in it alongside Chile's SQM, the public bank Bpifrance and the water specialist Ovive.
- Who runs Supernova Invest?
- Supernova Invest is led by managing partners Pierre-Emmanuel Struyven and Régis Saleur, both from the original CEA Investissement team that founded the firm. Its water and wider energy-and-environment bets sit with Marine Glon, a senior investment director on the Adionics board, and partners David Hansen and Romain Sautrau.
- Is Supernova Invest the same as Supernova Invest GmbH?
- No. This profile covers Supernova Invest, the Paris-based deeptech venture-capital firm founded in 2017. A separate, unrelated company, Supernova Invest GmbH, is a Central European retail real-estate group operating shopping centres. The water investment discussed here belongs to the French venture fund, through its portfolio company Adionics.