Credits: Jonathan Anguelov (Wikimedia user: The wikizzard) / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0.
On January 8, 2026, at 9:10 p.m., M6 is relaunching Qui veut être mon associé ? and installs a new juror among the investors’ chairs: Jonathan Anguelov. Co-founder of Aircall, the company he created with his partners, a former child placed in Child Protective Services, he left the operational side of French Tech to invest, on and off camera, via Aguesseau Capital and Offstone, his real estate and hotel investment vehicles. His promise, repeated in interviews, can be summed up in one phrase: to pass on knowledge and reach out to those who don’t dare.
A Fresh Face In A Well-Oiled Machine
On the show, everything starts before anyone speaks. The lights bleach foreheads, while cameras line up like silent judges. An entrepreneur waits their turn clutching a file too thin to hold years. When the doors open, the story must fit within a single breath. The pitch here isn’t a speech, it’s a test of presence. There’s little time to state the market, the solution, the traction, the demand. Even less time to let vulnerability through.
Qui veut être mon associé ? found its balance by making money visible, almost narratable. Numbers become supporting characters, the decision a climactic beat. The investors have turned into familiar silhouettes, with their tics, refusals, and maxims. After the 2025 season, the sixth season adds a new body to this drama: Jonathan Anguelov, 39, announced as another investor but expected as an additional story.
The set looks like a plush courtroom, where you plead your growth with a smile. You must speak fast, appear solid, and know when to yield. Anguelov arrives in that grammar with a singularity the production clearly noticed: the man doesn’t just have a portfolio, he has a past that cracks certainties. Just hear him speak of the fear of being “worthless,” or the feeling of not belonging. Then the myth of a mechanical meritocracy starts to wobble.
Foster Care Or The School Of Instability
What runs through Anguelov’s portraits isn’t the decoration of a difficult childhood, it’s an early education in the unexpected. Placed in foster care as a teenager, he lived in group homes and foster families. What you learn there isn’t ambition. It’s anticipation. Thresholds, schedules, rules, backpacks to repack. You grow up among decisions made elsewhere. In such a life, orders always seem a bit out of reach.
At that age, solitude isn’t a theme, it’s an organization. According to biographies, he left CPS at 19 and clung to studies, eventually earning a degree from ESCP. This educational trajectory, rarely highlighted on screen, nevertheless shows the other side of the story: patience more than lightning.
When a trajectory like this is told on television, it instantly becomes collective material. It inspires, it annoys, it reassures. It can also serve as proof—what television loves and what life hates. Anguelov knows this, and you sometimes sense a caution behind his words. He speaks of money as protection, less as a trophy than as a shelter. He doesn’t 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 raised him alone. A family history without a father figure recurs in his accounts. First as a primary strength, then as an absence. The death of his mother, mentioned in several profiles, froze that relationship to urgency. Again, television could turn all of this into a scene. Journalism must instead keep the right distance: 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: modernize business telephony by moving it to the cloud, plug voice into digital tools, make customer relations smoother and more controllable. The young company emerged within eFounders, now Hexa, that Parisian factory that seeded part of French Tech’s vocabulary and methods. With his partners, Olivier Pailhès, Pierre-Baptiste Béchu and Xavier Durand, Anguelov took part in the moment when French Tech learned to think global.
Growth in a startup feels like learning a foreign language while running. You hire and open offices. You learn not to break what works, but you discover the quiet violence of targets. As the company grows, it also relocates geographically. France, then international. English takes hold. Sales teams become an army. The numbers, each quarter, decide the general mood.
On June 23, 2021, the company announced a $120 million funding round and at the same time crossed the symbolic threshold of a valuation over a billion. A unicorn, then, with all the prestige and caricature the word carries. That date acted like a baptism for the ecosystem, but also an intimate turning point. Success in tech can be an endless acceleration. It’s easier to understand the temptation to seek another pace.
In September 2023, he stepped away from operational duties. Not by rupture, but by shift. This move is common among founders when the company becomes a machine. The startup, now big, calls for processes, committees, cycles. The entrepreneur often looks for momentum, decision, action. In the public narrative, this withdrawal becomes a narrative transition, almost an elegance: leaving tech just when you could settle there.
From Startup To Buildings, The Desire For A Tangible Long Term
Anguelov’s pivot says something about contemporary France. At a time when tech promises the immaterial, he turns toward what weighs and anchors. What resists includes real estate and hospitality. He founded Aguesseau Capital and claims a strategy of slower value creation, backed by assets, renovations, and uses. The vocabulary changes. There is less talk of exponential growth, more of trade-offs, renovations, and management.
In the narrative he lets slip, one episode serves as a hinge. In 2018, he sold all his real estate holdings, mostly studios and service rooms. That allowed him to scale up. With his partner Gaëtan Chebrou, he bought a first hotel in Paris, renovated it, and renamed it Maison Barbès, as a way to root the investment in a neighborhood, therefore in the real.
There is an intimate logic to this preference for buildings. When you grew up feeling you had no stable address, owning walls becomes more than an investment. It feels like repair. Yet real estate is not a moral refuge. It’s an industry with tensions, blind spots, and rent effects. In France, access to housing is tightening with prices and rates creating social boundaries. Consequently, an investor cannot be satisfied with a personal narrative.
And the times add another demand: ecology. Buildings concentrate renovation, efficiency, and energy consumption challenges. Saying “sustainable” no longer means the same thing. You must mean sustainable for value and sustainable for footprint. In this area, hospitality players are expected to act. They renovate, heat, host, and feed tourist flows. The walls tell an economy, but also a responsibility.
Offstone, The Promise Of Access And The Risk Of Confusion
In winter 2026, another name sticks to him insistently: Offstone, presented as an investment club for real estate based on co-investment. The principle appeals because it matches a contemporary impatience. Many want to participate, no longer just watch rent from afar, and enter deals formerly reserved for insiders.
The project emerges amid heavy media exposure. Moreover, it’s clear television also serves as an echo chamber. In his book Rien à perdre, published by Alisio in 2025, Anguelov recounts the passage from the group home to the company and reaffirms a credo of transmission. Offstone fits into that declared continuity, with the ambiguities any access promise carries.
But democratization has its ambiguities. Opening up, pooling, sharing—all sound good. Still, you must specify what’s shared: the gain, the risk, the duration, the complexity. On television, investing appears as a clean gesture, a yes or no. In reality, it’s played out in files, clauses, and trade-offs where emotion does not weigh. Anguelov’s appearance on M6, just as he promotes Offstone, is a very contemporary collision: visibility as fuel, narrative as accelerator.
In his public remarks, he says he wants to “help those who don’t dare.” The phrase lands because it speaks to several audiences: entrepreneurs trembling before stepping through the studio door; viewers who feel illegitimate facing the economy. It can also become a communication line if you’re not careful. That’s where journalistic distance becomes necessary: hear possible sincerity without confusing promise with proof.
The Set As A Social Mirror, And A Simplifying Machine
Qui veut être mon associé ? is not just entertainment. It’s a mirror of our relationship to work, success, and the possibility of changing one’s life. You see a France that starts businesses, dreams of growth, and believes it can compress complexity into a few minutes. You observe an economy where visibility is as important as solidity. Also, people seek not only funds but public validation.
Anguelov’s arrival shifts the focus. His story reintroduces a question business likes to sidestep: where do you start? Birth, protections, absences—everything that doesn’t show up on slides. Foster childhood cracks the comfort of the meritocratic tale. It reminds us that boldness depends on conditions of possibility. Those vary depending on where you come from.
But the set simplifies by nature. It turns trajectories into clear lines, decisions into moments. Television loves the instant the investor cuts the debate because it looks like justice. Yet investment, especially serious investment, is about duration. Agreements are discussed, reread, and renegotiated. It happens that studio enthusiasm bumps up against legal realities or post-show disagreements. That gap doesn’t invalidate the program, but it reminds what it is: 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 culinary world, known for developing the D’Artagnan brand in the United States. Her presence broadens the investment map. It’s no longer just about software and hypergrowth, but about food, supply chains, craftsmanship, and quality.
The confrontation of these profiles is, for television, a perfect device. On one side, the cloud and global sales teams. On the other, materials, taste, and the chain of life. Between them, the same logic: select, support, bet. The show becomes a small France of business, where visions clash without caricature.
For Anguelov, this coexistence is also a way out of the tech corridor. He brings a culture of hiring, internationalism, and pace. He also brings, he says, the memory of doubt. On the set, the fear of not being legitimate becomes a dramatic spring. In real life, it is often a discipline.
Success Tested By Distance
Every entrepreneur’s TV portrait faces a contradiction. Success is often told as a clear line, a coherent destiny, an upward staircase. Reality is full of detours, fatigue, chance, and helping hands. Anguelov stresses work, endurance, and consistency. He also insists on rejecting bling, on a displayed sobriety.
This sobriety, paradoxically, has become a code of the era. In a world selling dreams, claiming to be discreet is claiming to be reliable. That proves nothing, but it tells a posture: the investor who doesn’t promise miracles, the entrepreneur who doesn’t turn their life into an easy novel. The danger, conversely, is turning this posture into an aura.
The main question remains: what happens once the cameras are off? The show values the instant, the cutting line, the face that says yes. The investor’s work plays out in the shadows, in patient support, in discreet renunciations. The TV juror is a role. The investor is a responsibility.
An Entrance That Tells An Era
Jonathan Anguelov’s arrival on M6 is television news, but it speaks beyond the screen. It describes the importance of entrepreneurship in the collective imagination. Indeed, economic success seems to have become a kind of national narrative. It also reflects the public appetite for stories of transition, repair, and transmission.
In a country that sometimes mistrusts money while dreaming of taming it, Anguelov offers a paradoxical figure: an investor who speaks of fragility, a numbers man who talks about repair. Television likes these contradictions because they resemble life. Journalism must use them to ask the persistent question, away from the set. How do you turn a survival story into a way of acting? That must be done without turning the intimate into an argument. Also, avoid letting the screen absorb everything.
That night, his way of looking, questioning, and saying no will be judged. But the issue isn’t only whether the new juror makes a good on-screen character. It is understanding 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 polish of the lights, of a simple truth: you don’t become a partner with a sentence. You become one through time. And sometimes, by how you choose to share it.
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