Hélène Labaume (Carrefour): “In the modern retail industry, the trick is to adapt constantly, and in all areas”

Leaders League: Carrefour has launched Dastore, an investment fund dedicated to retail and technology. What’s the strategic thinking behind it?
Hélène Labaume: We created Dastore a little over three years ago in tandem with the Daphni fund. The idea was to position Carrefour as a digital retail company, fully connected to the start-up ecosystem and to product and process innovations.

Dastore is built around four major investment themes: the future of retail, fintech, impact and data/tech for operations. We wanted an agile investment vehicle with a hybrid structure: the funds are managed as a single-LP by VC firm Daphni, while Carrefour retains the ability to interact directly with early-stage startups. With an €80 million allocation, we primarily invest at the seed and pre-seed stages. Today, we have around 20 portfolio companies, and our ambition is to invest in between four and seven startups per year.

How does Dastore help startups move from concept to industrial scale?
We primarily provide our industry expertise and market knowledge. When a pilot is launched, it’s because it addresses a real, concrete need. Startups can, for example, benefit from our purchasing terms, as well as easier access to clients, markets and data that are useful for their development, helping them scale more swiftly.

What types of startups are you looking to support, and how do these investments align with Carrefour’s overall strategy?
We rely on Daphni’s experience to identify relevant projects that align with our four investment priorities. We then review each case in detail to confirm its relevance and identify startups that not only address a need specific to Carrefour, but also have broader impact across the ecosystem. With this in mind, Carrefour launched the StoreMeUp program, a start-up accelerator focused on digitalization in retail (including new payment methods, computer vision, robotics and the augmented employee). These startups can access a dedicated dataset to test their solutions in real-world conditions.

Carrefour’s ambition is to invest in between four and seven startups per year

What have you learned from the start-up ecosystem?
Above all, the importance of agility. In the modern retail industry, the trick is to adapt constantly, and in all areas. You have to constantly stay on top of emerging channels and evolving customer expectations. Thanks to this approach, we have access to a wide variety of projects, which allows us to identify and explore solutions to specific pain points.  

Carrefour’s chatbot, Hopla+, is built on Google Gemini technology. What, in concrete terms, does AI change for your consumers and employees?
We launched Hopla in 2023, initially focusing on recipes and shopping assistance. Since then, both the technology and customer expectations have evolved: we’ve embraced agentic AI to further streamline the customer journey. Hopla+ enables multimodal interaction: customers can make complex requests, either in writing or via voice commands, directly within the app.

Based on shopping habits, it offers a range of product categories. Depending on the customer’s selection, the AI can then generate intelligent product suggestions and help them fill their shopping cart. On average, Hopla+ serves 100,000 unique users per month, with the average basket value €43.

What concrete applications do you see emerging in the coming years?
No one can predict exactly how we will shop in the future. The internet itself took decades to change our habits. The difference today is the unprecedented speed at which technology evolves. The real challenge now is the ability to continuously adapt across all areas to meet our customers’ expectations, whatever the channel.