Roni Carta was 13 when he closed a book and decided what he wanted to be when he grew up. Not a doctor, not an engineer, not a footballer. He wanted to be Arsène Lupin, the fictional French gentleman thief who outsmarts everyone, except in a version of the world that didn't quite exist yet in his head.
"I can become that guy, but for computers," he remembers thinking.
That kid is now 24, runs a cybersecurity company called Depi, and has just closed a $5.9 million pre-seed round co-led by 20VC and Seedcamp, with participation from Purple, Kima Ventures, and the founders of Wiz, Hugging Face, and GitGuardian. He's also about to swap Grenoble for San Francisco, which he describes, with the enthusiasm of someone who hasn't yet paid Bay Area rent, as "a theme park for developers."
Depi was, until recently, known as Lupin & Holmes. The rebrand is recent and deliberate. Lupin & Holmes was the research lab; Depi is the product. There was also a smaller, more personal reason.
"[Lupin] was actually my nickname," Carta said. "I'm kind of glad that we're moving away from the company name, because people were talking about the company, and I got confused about that, and I was like, 'That's my nickname. Stop saying it's the company.'"
A Weird Kind Of Education
The path from 13-year-old Lupin fan to venture-backed founder is not the standard French startup trajectory of bac, grande école, internship, job. Carta skipped most of it.
