Victoria Safar, co-founder and CEO of Manabu, joins Sunny Ray to discuss her path from engineering school in France to venture capital in New York and Paris, and finally to founding her own company. She explains how her VC experience at Plug and Play, working across US, European, and Asian ecosystems, shaped her understanding of what makes startups scalable. Victoria shares how Manabu began as an idea to connect enterprises with startups, then pivoted after discovering companies lacked good tools to build e-learning training. Manabu now combines an LMS and AI authoring tool in one platform, letting companies turn documents like PDFs into interactive video courses in minutes. She discusses landing her first paying client before even building the product, being incubated at Station F, navigating the more cautious French VC landscape, and why solving a large, deeply felt problem matters more than anything else when pitching. The conversation closes with her outlook on where corporate learning and Manabu are headed over the next five years.
A former VC turned founder explains how she built an AI powered corporate learning platform from Paris to Station F.
Can you tell us a bit about Manabu and what you're building?
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Manabu. We build software that helps companies create their own e-learning training. We take content from enterprises, like a PDF, and turn it into a real interactive video experience that's adaptive to each learner.
What pulled you toward tech in the first place?
I tried working in financial markets during engineering school and it didn't fit me at all. I did a startup internship as chief of staff and realized I wanted to build myself. Then during COVID I got an internship at a VC firm in Paris and got hooked on interviewing founders and seeing new technologies shape the world.
What was your first job in New York at an incubator like?
I moved to the US and helped a student founder build their startup. It was incredible discovering the New York startup environment, going to VC events and demo days trying to find investors. You'd meet founders who just raised 300 million one day and Sequoia investors the next. We don't have that kind of fast, huge ecosystem in France.
If you had to distill it down, what do investors unanimously care about?
First is the founder, the team. Second is market size. Third is traction. I'd weight it around 50 percent team, because even without VC knowledge, a strong team can find advisors to navigate to the biggest market. Team is what stays stable in a company. Traction matters too since VCs got burned funding unprofitable startups and now really want proof of profitability.
What was the hardest thing to give up leaving VC to become a founder?
In VC you have the money and the power to choose who you invest in, and people told me I was stupid to quit that for a startup. I loved the job and still invest a little on the side. But I always wanted to build my own thing, and I met the CEO of a hotel chain in Paris who said he'd be my first client, so I just went for it.
Is this corporate client paying for the development, and how did that traction happen?
Oh my goodness, yes, home run. They're still our biggest client right now. They follow every one of our pivots. We started helping them find startups, then educating their teams, and now they want to scale e-learning across their whole company. We're really happy to have them, alongside other clients like a real estate company and ESCP business school.
Why combine an LMS and an AI authoring tool in one platform instead of doing just one?
The space is really fragmented, with separate tools for LMS, video, and podcasts, so enterprises waste time and can't share data across platforms to improve courses. We wanted everything connected so companies can create a full e-learning course in as little as 15 minutes instead of juggling multiple tools.
Where is corporate learning heading in five years, and where does Manabu fit?
From my time at Plug and Play talking to chief innovation officers at companies like BNP Paribas, I learned corporates need startups to solve a real, costly, time consuming problem they deeply feel, not something abstract. Even if corporate decision making is slow, if you solve a big enough problem for them, that's what wins them over.
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