On January 8, 2026, at 9:10 PM, M6 is relaunching Who Wants to Be My Partner? and introducing a new juror among the investors’ chairs: Jonathan Anguelov. Co-founder of Aircall, the company created with his partners, a former child in Child Welfare Services, he left the operational side of French Tech to invest, both on and off the set, through Aguesseau Capital and Offstone, his real estate and hotel investment vehicles. His promise, repeated in interviews, is encapsulated in a formula: to pass on knowledge and lend a hand to those who dare not.
A fresh face in a well-oiled machine
In the show, everything begins before words are spoken. The spotlights whiten the foreheads, while the cameras line up like silent judges. An entrepreneur waits for their turn, clutching a folder too thin to contain years of work. When the doors open, the story must fit within a breath. The pitch here is not a speech; it’s a test of presence. There’s little time to explain the market, the solution, the traction, the demand. There’s even less time to let any vulnerability show.
Who Wants to Be My Partner? has found its balance by making money visible, almost narratable. The numbers become secondary characters, the decision a climax. The investors have turned into familiar figures, with their quirks, refusals, and maxims. After the 2025 edition, the sixth season adds a new body to this drama: Jonathan Anguelov, 39 years old, announced as just another investor, but expected as an additional story.
The setting resembles a plush courtroom, where one pleads for growth with a smile. You have to speak quickly, appear solid, know when to yield. Anguelov enters this grammar with a singularity that the production has clearly noticed: the man not only has a portfolio, but a past that cracks certainties. Just hearing him talk about the fear of being "useless," or the feeling of not belonging, makes the myth of a mechanical meritocracy waver.
Foster care or the school of instability
What runs through Anguelov’s portraits is not the decoration of a difficult childhood, but an early learning of the unexpected. Placed in foster care from adolescence, he went through homes and foster families. What you learn there is not ambition. It’s anticipation. The thresholds, the schedules, the rules, the bags to repack. You grow up amid decisions made elsewhere. In a life, the controls always seem a bit out of reach.
At that age, solitude is not a theme; it’s an organization. According to biographies, he left CWS at 19 and clung to his studies, eventually earning a degree from ESCP. This academic trajectory, rarely highlighted on screen, tells the other side of the story, patience more than a flash.
When such a trajectory is told on television, it immediately becomes collective material. It inspires, it annoys, it reassures. It can also serve as proof, which television loves, but life hates. Anguelov knows this, and sometimes, behind his words, you can sense caution. He talks about money as protection, less as a trophy than as a shelter. He does not present himself as a conqueror, but as a survivor turned strategist.
The most intimate shadow, that of his mother, surfaces in touches. Born in Bulgaria and arriving in France, she was raised alone. A family story without a paternal figure recurs in his narratives. First as a primal force, then as an absence. The death of his mother, mentioned in several portraits, froze this relationship in urgency. Again, television could turn everything into a scene. Journalism, on the other hand, must maintain the right distance: to say what enlightens without exhibiting.
Aircall, hypergrowth as a dialect
Before real estate, there was technology and the trial of tempo. Aircall was born in 2014 with a clear idea: to modernize business telephony by moving it to the cloud, connecting voice to digital tools, making customer relations smoother, more manageable. The young company emerged within eFounders, now Hexa, the Parisian incubator that has spread part of the vocabulary and methods of French Tech. With his partners, Olivier Pailhès, Pierre-Baptiste Béchu, and Xavier Durand, Anguelov participated in this moment when French Tech learned to think globally.
Growth in a startup is like learning a foreign language on the run. You hire and open offices. You learn not to break what works, but you discover the discreet violence of objectives. As the company grows, it also moves geographically. France, then international. English becomes dominant. The sales teams become an army. The numbers, each quarter, decide the general mood.
On June 23, 2021, the company announced a funding round of $120 million and simultaneously crossed the symbolic threshold of companies valued over a billion. A unicorn, then, with all the prestige and caricature the word carries. This date acts as a baptism for the ecosystem, but also as an intimate turning point. Success in tech can be an endless acceleration. This makes the temptation to seek another rhythm more understandable.
In September 2023, he withdrew from operations. Not by rupture, but rather by displacement. This movement is common among founders when the company becomes a machine. The startup, having grown, demands processes, committees, cycles. The entrepreneur often seeks momentum, decision, action. In the public narrative, this withdrawal becomes a narrative transition, almost an elegance: leaving tech at the moment one could settle in.
From startup to construction, the desire for a tangible long term
Anguelov’s shift also says something about our French era. At a time when tech promises the immaterial, it turns towards what is weighty and anchored. What resists includes real estate and hospitality. He founded Aguesseau Capital and claims a strategy of slower value creation, based on assets, renovations, uses. The vocabulary changes. We talk less about exponential growth, more about arbitrations, work, management.
In the story he lets through, an episode serves as a hinge. In 2018, he sold all his real estate assets, mainly studios and service rooms. This allowed him to change scale. With his partner Gaëtan Chebrou, he bought a first hotel in Paris, renovated it, and renamed it Maison Barbès, as a way to inscribe the investment in a neighborhood, thus in reality.
There is an intimate logic in this preference for the built. When you grow up with the feeling of not having a stable address, owning walls becomes more than an investment. It resembles a repair. Yet real estate is not a moral refuge. It’s an industry with its tensions, blind spots, rent effects. In France, access to housing is tightening with prices and rates creating social boundaries. Consequently, the investor cannot be content with a personal narrative.
And the era adds another requirement: ecology. The building sector concentrates issues of renovation, sobriety, energy consumption. Talking about "sustainable" no longer has the same meaning. It must be sustainable for value and sustainable for the footprint. In this area, hotel actors are expected. They renovate, they heat, they host, they feed tourist flows. The walls tell an economy, but also a responsibility.
Offstone, the promise of access and the risk of confusion
In the winter of 2026, another name is insistently associated with him: Offstone, presented as a real estate investment club based on co-investment. The principle is appealing because it aligns with contemporary impatience. Many want to participate, no longer watch the rent from afar, enter operations once reserved for insiders.
The project arrives in the midst of a media sequence. Moreover, it is understood that television also serves as a sounding board. In his book Nothing to Lose, published by Alisio in 2025, Anguelov retraces this journey from foster care to business and reaffirms a credo of transmission. Offstone fits into this declared continuity, with the ambiguities that any promise of access carries.
But democratization has its ambiguities. Opening, mutualizing, sharing, all sound good. Yet it is necessary to specify what is shared: the gain, the risk, the duration, the complexity. On television, investment appears as a clear gesture, a yes or a no. In reality, it plays out in files, clauses, arbitrations where emotion does not weigh. Anguelov’s appearance on M6, at the very moment he highlights Offstone, is a very contemporary collision: visibility as fuel, narration as an accelerator.
In his speeches, he says he wants to "help those who dare not." The phrase resonates because it speaks to multiple audiences. To entrepreneurs who tremble before crossing the set’s threshold. To viewers who feel illegitimate in front of the economy. It can also become a line of communication if one is not careful. This is where journalistic distance becomes necessary: to hear the possible sincerity without confusing promise and proof.
The set as a social mirror, and as a simplification machine
Who Wants to Be My Partner? is not just entertainment. It’s a mirror of our relationship to work, success, the possibility of changing lives. We see a France that undertakes, dreams of growth, believes it can summarize its complexity in a few minutes. We observe an economy where visibility is as important as solidity. Moreover, we seek not only funds but also public validation.
Anguelov’s arrival shifts the focus. His story reintroduces a question that business likes to sidestep: where do we start from? Birth, protections, absences, all that does not appear in the slides. Foster care cracks the comfort of the meritocratic narrative. It reminds us that boldness depends on conditions of possibility. Indeed, these vary depending on where one comes from.
But the set simplifies by nature. It turns trajectories into clear lines, decisions into moments. Television loves the moment when the investor decides because it resembles justice. Yet investment, especially when serious, is a duration. The agreement is discussed, reread, renegotiated. Sometimes the enthusiasm of the set clashes with legal realities or subsequent disagreements. This discrepancy does not invalidate the show, but it reminds us of what it is: a useful theater, not a trading floor.
With Ariane Daguin, a duo that broadens the notion of success
This season also welcomes Ariane Daguin, a Franco-American entrepreneur from the gastronomy sector, known for developing the D’Artagnan brand in the United States. Her presence broadens the investment map. We no longer talk only about software and hypergrowth, but about food, sectors, know-how, quality.
The confrontation of these profiles is, for television, a perfect setup. On one side, the cloud and globalized sales teams. On the other, the material, the taste, the living chain. Between the two, the same logic: select, support, bet. The show becomes a small France of business, where visions clash without caricaturing.
For Anguelov, this coexistence is also a way to step out of the tech corridor. He brings the culture of recruitment, internationalization, rhythm. He also brings, he says, the memory of doubt. On the set, the fear of not being legitimate becomes a dramatic spring. In reality, it is often a discipline.
Success at the test of distance
Every entrepreneur’s portrait on a TV set faces a contradiction. Success is willingly told as a clear line, a coherent destiny, an ascending staircase. Reality, however, is made of detours, fatigue, chance, helping hands. Anguelov insists on work, endurance, constancy. He also insists on a refusal of bling, an displayed sobriety.
This sobriety, paradoxically, has become a code of the era. In a world where dreams are sold, claiming to be discreet equates to claiming reliability. It proves nothing, but it tells a posture: the investor who does not promise miracles, the entrepreneur who does not turn their life into an easy novel. The danger, conversely, would be to turn this posture into an aura.
The main issue remains: what do we do once the camera is off? The show values the moment, the decisive phrase, the face that says yes. The work of an investor takes place in the shadows, in patient support, in discreet renunciations. The TV juror is a role. The investor, on the other hand, is a responsibility.
An Entrance That Tells an Era
The arrival of Jonathan Anguelov on M6 is a television event, but it speaks beyond the screen. It describes the importance of entrepreneurship in the collective imagination. Indeed, economic success seems to have become a form of national narrative. It also reflects the public’s appetite for stories of transition, repair, and transmission.
In a country where people sometimes distrust money while dreaming of taming it, Anguelov offers a paradoxical character: an investor who talks about fragility, a man of numbers who speaks of repair. Television loves these contradictions because they resemble life. Journalism must use this to ask the question that persists, far from the set. How to transform a survival story into a way of acting? This must be done without making the personal an argument. Moreover, the screen must not absorb everything.
That evening, his way of looking, questioning, and saying no will be judged. But the issue is not only whether the new juror is a good character. It is to understand what our era expects from an investor: to sign, to advise, to tell stories, and to repair, all at once. And to measure what remains, despite the gloss of the lights, of a simple truth: one does not become a partner with a phrase. One becomes a partner through time. And, sometimes, by the way one chooses to share it.