What happens when a venture fund removes its own pressure to sell, exit or extract, before it makes a single investment? 2050 is owned by a French perpetual purpose trust with no shareholders, governed by fifteen Stewards, and structured as an evergreen fund with no ten-year exit clock. Ownership, governance and capital structure were designed together from day one.
Marie Ekeland launched 2050 in November 2020, after nearly two decades inside conventional venture capital. She had been an investor at Elaia, where she backed Criteo through to its US public listing, co-founded France Digitale, the country's main startup lobby, and built her own VC firm, Daphni. Her reasoning for starting again from scratch was simple: “Investment is self-fulfilling. When you invest in this company instead of that one, you're shaping the future of society.”
Ekeland set out to redesign the fund itself: its ownership, governance and capital structure, so it could not drift back toward the short-term pressures she had spent her career working inside.
2050.do, the management company, is controlled by 2050.stewards, a fonds de pérennité: a French legal structure that works like a perpetual purpose trust. It holds 100% of the management company's shares. There are no shareholders. Fifteen Stewards, representing the fund's key stakeholders, govern the trust and vote on its budget, fees and structural decisions, making 2050.do one of the first steward-owned venture management companies.
The investment vehicle, 2050.ventures, is an evergreen fund. Conventional VC funds run for eight to ten years and have to exit their positions to return capital to limited partners, which creates pressure to push portfolio companies toward a sale or IPO on someone else's timeline. 2050 opens liquidity windows at intervals instead, letting investors buy and sell fund shares without forcing an exit on any portfolio company. As Ekeland put it at launch: “What we're doing is quite innovative, so we're learning by doing.”
Because the trust owns the management company, the team can never build it up and sell it. Their reward comes from how well the fund performs.
- An Alignment Framework, developed with venture builder We Are Human (co-founders of Kahoot!), scoring prospective and portfolio companies against six Key Alignment Indicators: founder and team engagement, aligned business model, systemic impact, social equity, planetary impact, and mission-lock.
- A standing commitment of 10% of every investment and 50% of the team's own carried interest to shared, open resources, including a free course on ecological challenges co-run with Université Paris Dauphine and open sustainability research through the 2050.commons association.
- A portfolio spanning climate, health and food, including Withings, Sweep, ClimateView and Paebbl, with founders on record backing the model: ClimateView's Einar Boström described 2050's investment conversations as having “such precision and depth that they deserve to be called profound.”
- An ambition to raise around €150 million a year and deploy €1 billion by 2030, a size that few steward-owned or evergreen funds have yet reached.
2050 tests, in practice, whether removing a fund's own exit pressure changes what it is willing to invest in and how patiently it can support the companies it backs. If 2050 reaches anything close to its €1 billion ambition, it will be one of the clearest live examples of what a steward-owned investor can do at the scale conventional venture capital already operates at.