NewTech Friday: Caravel – Reinventing retirement

What led to the creation of Caravel?

In 2019, strikes and protests against pension reforms in France made me, as a self-employed entrepreneur at the time, wonder how much I had contributed during my five years of professional activities. When I looked it up and found out that I had contributed €17, I realized there was no guarantee of getting a decent pension. Hence, I tried to subscribe to a private pension scheme.

Most people find pensions boring and anxiety-inducing, and I understood why people procrastinate and don't prepare early enough. Pension providers are confusing and complex, so people procrastinate and don't start preparing early enough for their retirement.

Upset and far from being alone in this situation – 81% of 25-40 year olds in France think they will not have a pension – I realized that reshaping retirement has become necessary to tackle the climate change emergency and the Future of Work challenges.

So I decided to create an alternative, Caravel, the first tech player for retirement, to re-invent it and make it simple with one mission: guarantee a retirement for all in a livable world. Working with my co-founders Hugo Lancel and Marie Janoviez, we surrounded ourselves with incredible mentors, experts, investors and collaborators to create what would become Caravel.

Could you present Caravel's offer?

The idea is simple: make pensions as easy, accessible and attractive as possible, with an outstanding customer experience and full transparency.

Caravel is a personal web app that helps the self-employed understand how much they contribute to retirement and what it will represent in the future, and thus helps them to save and invest for their retirement. It offers an online pension plan which is fully transparent and easy to use (subscribe and manage).

Caravel only invests money in green funds, with a highly selective criteria process, to fund a world worth living for. If climate issues are no longer to be reversed, certain actions can greatly help in the fight against global warming. Investing pensions in green funds has 21 times more impact[L1]  in terms of carbon footprint than becoming vegetarian and giving up air travel. (Please keep cutting back on meat, riding your bike, and getting clean energy in your homes. Just make sure your money turbocharges those steps, not undermines them!)

What's coming next for Caravel?

Caravel is strengthening its leading position as pension provider for self-employed by bringing in the founders of Audacia (Charles Beigbeder), Anytime (Damien Dupouy), Made.com (Julien Callede), Fruitz (Julian Kabab), Anaxago (François Carbone), MWM (Jean-Baptiste Hironde), and Tomcat Factory (Patrice Thiry), among others, to boost its capital and thus dust off an opaque and aging sector.

Next steps for the young company are to quadruple its number of customers, double its team size and deploy new features for self-employed, before expanding its services to all individuals in order to embrace all nonlinear careers.