Gildo Pastor, from electric cars to the Moon: the Venturi boss scales up

At the Choose France summit, Venturi’s Monaco-based owner announced €250m of investment and nearly 200 jobs in Toulouse for his space business, twenty-five years after taking over a bankrupt brand.

The setting was the Palace of Versailles; the announcement was an industrialist’s. At the Choose France summit on Monday, Gildo Pallanca Pastor unveiled a €250m investment in a 16,000 m² technology centre in Toulouse, with nearly 200 jobs by 2030, Le Journal des Entreprises reported. The site is to host Venturi Space’s lunar programmes, including the MONA LUNA rover, which Europe aims to send to the Moon in 2030.

Nothing suggested the small Monaco brand would end up in space. A businessman and property developer in Monaco, Gildo Pastor bought Venturi in the early 2000s, after the sports car maker went bankrupt. He refocused it entirely on electric vehicles, at a time when carmakers showed little interest in them.

The bet first played out through image. In 2002 Venturi presented the Fétish, an electric sports car designed by Sacha Lakic and sold in small numbers from 2004. Then came the records: with Ohio State University, the Venturi Buckeye Bullet repeatedly broke the land speed record for electric vehicles on the Bonneville salt flats. The boss knows speed himself: in 1995 he set an ice speed record at the wheel of a Bugatti EB110.

In June 2015 Venturi announced it would stop producing cars in their existing form. The company concentrated on research and racing, before another change of direction in 2020: at its owner’s initiative, it launched an electric lunar rover programme, which gave rise to Venturi Space.

Milestones have followed in quick succession. In February 2025 the astronaut Jean-François Clervoy became an ambassador for Venturi Space. In June the Cité de l’espace in Toulouse signed a partnership with the company, which designs and builds in the city the on-board electronics for the FLEX rover of its US partner, Venturi Astrolab. A few days later MONA LUNA was unveiled at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget, presented as a fully European rover.

The group can also rely on a heavyweight partner across the Atlantic: NASA has selected the CLV-1 rover, developed by Venturi Astrolab, to carry astronauts on the Moon from 2028, according to Aeromorning.

The Monaco entrepreneur does not confine himself to one trade. In May 2025 he announced, with the director Mathieu Kassovitz, the creation of Venturi Production, a film company. In Monaco, Prince Albert II visited Venturi Space in November 2024, and four rovers were displayed in summer 2025 at the Prince’s Car Collection.

Venturi’s history nonetheless calls for caution. Spectacular announcements have not always held: car production stopped in 2015, ten years after promising beginnings. For Toulouse, no start date for construction has been given, and the lunar venture depends heavily on public programmes, European and American alike, subject to budgets and political choices. The space dream is also a long-haul bet whose profitability has yet to be proven.

With Toulouse, Venturi crosses a threshold. The small company born on the Rock is becoming an industrial player in European space, without leaving Fontvieille, where the group keeps its headquarters.