Nicolas Mendiharat's Linkedin Analytics

I founded 7 consumer tech startups around my lifestyle & passions and am now gathering everything into a private equity firm. I started with Ski Tour Operating for student groups at 22 - probably because I didn’t want to leave the student life too early and I’m a mountain fan, sold that company 5 years later to the French travel leader at the time, Nouvelles Frontières. To keep myself busy, I geeked out meanwhile coding a bus transportation software which eventually became a startup on its own and sold it later in 2004. When the internet became a big thing in 1999, I decided to create the largest booking website for ski vacations. I lead skihorizon.com for more than 10 years until it became the industry leader with 300k customers. A bit bored by online travel and Europe, my larger ambitions took me from France to San Francisco with Recommend, a recommendation app which was praised and won several awards to tackle the long overdue friends recommendations problem, but eventually failed raising enough money. I learnt a lesson (or two) and decided to combine all my prior skills to build the next generation of tech enabled wine businesses, another of my passions. I created Palate Club in 2018, which is the most advanced taste matching engine using AI optimizing wine selections & educate your personal taste. After AI, it was blockchain which attracted me as one of the most promising technologies to change the world so I founded Winechain, a new marketplace for fine wine using blockchain. After 2 years of building Winechain, I decided it was about time to spread my wings across activities & decided to invest with the best partners, advisors and operators I met on my journey throughout the US and Europe. Permanium Capital is focused on luxury services & luxury assets, leveraging AI, tech and customer cross pollination. Permanium's structure is also innovative in Private Equity as an hybrid between fund management, incubation and roll-up strategies.