Clément Benoit keeps finding room for another business

An empty shop in New York is an expensive way of displaying nothing. In 2018, Clément Benoit had a proposal for the landlord: let people come in for a class. Fithouse, the company he co-founded, would occupy vacant retail space on short leases, giving a room an income and a neighbourhood another place to gather. The shop could await its permanent tenant while doing something more useful than collecting property brochures.

“They need to activate their space,” Benoit said. His interest was practical. A shorter agreement could be negotiated in weeks, while a long lease might take months. The arrangement gave Fithouse a way to test locations. It gave owners some rent. Beneath the booking app sat a familiar urban problem: somebody had a room and somebody else had a reason to use it.

That room offers a useful entrance to Benoit’s working life. The French entrepreneur had already built businesses around restaurant delivery and the movement of goods through cities. Later, with Clone, he would return to food and other people’s premises. His career is full of software, but the software keeps arriving at a very physical destination.

Dinner first. Then the journey.

There had been smaller sales before the restaurant business. At ten, Benoit printed a gazette and sold it on the streets of Paris. At fourteen, he spent an internship with a Swedish company selling paper by telephone. The products were modest; the activity was already recognisable. He was learning to approach people with something to sell, years before the pitch involved investors or a roomful of restaurant owners.

Benoit founded Resto-In in 2006, aged 21. The original task was persuading restaurants to send their meals beyond the dining room. He has described starting from a small Paris apartment, pitching restaurant owners and making deliveries in the evenings. Before delivery could become an interface on a screen, somebody had to agree that dinner should leave the building.

The sequence has a pleasing absence of glamour. A restaurant needs convincing. An order needs collecting. Someone has to take it to the right door. Those ordinary actions were the business. The founder’s early education came through repeating them, learning how the separate participants depended on one another and where the arrangements became awkward.

By 2015, GeoPost had acquired an 80% stake in Resto-In. That same year, Benoit and Benjamin Chemla co-founded Stuart, taking on the wider problem of urban delivery. The new company connected businesses with independent couriers. Restaurant food was one use; local commerce and online purchases gave the delivery network other work to do.

Stuart launched publicly in Paris in 2016 after a trial period, alongside operations in London and Barcelona. Its proposition brought merchants, dispatch technology and couriers into one service. In 2017, GeoPost increased its holding to 100%. Benoit had moved from getting a restaurant meal delivered to helping build the system through which many businesses could offer a delivery.

New York, on a shorter lease

Fithouse took Benoit into a different sort of operating business. He and Chemla were again co-founders. The New York launch offered unlimited classes for $99 a month, assembling several formats under a single membership. Customers could vary what they booked without assembling a collection of separate studio subscriptions.

The opening address was 276 Bowery. In June 2018, Fithouse announced locations in Noho and Union Square. Its ambitions had to become actual rooms, with actual timetables and people showing up to teach. A membership is sold once and delivered again at every visit. The gap between those two activities is where a studio earns its reputation.

Benoit was identified as Fithouse’s CEO in contemporary coverage. By September, a 4,500-square-foot lease at 93 Worth Street in Tribeca had joined the expansion. This was a long-term agreement in a former studio space, a useful detail alongside the early enthusiasm for short commitments. The company’s property choices were developing as it moved across Manhattan.

For Benoit, New York offered both openness and competition. He later described a place where introductions happened readily, while finding a position in the market remained difficult. Both observations can be true on the same afternoon. A friendly meeting is encouraging; a building full of competing alternatives still needs a reason to send customers through your door.

Fithouse eventually ended. In reflecting on it, Benoit has spoken about the responsibility of disappointing investors and parting with colleagues. The experience belongs beside his earlier exits. A founder’s next company does not erase the previous one, any more than a new lease settles an old account. It changes the experience available for the next decision.

“I’m not one to stay idle.”

Clément Benoit, reflecting on his career in 2024

The kitchen he chose to leave behind

With Alexandre Haggai, Benoit returned to restaurant operations through Not So Dark. The company began in 2020, creating food brands for delivery platforms. Its first model included dedicated kitchens. By February 2021, it had nine kitchens across Paris, Nice, Bordeaux and Barcelona, and had announced funding intended to support further openings.

The plan was substantial. Investment was going into premises and operations. Recipes, brands and a production network had to work together, with meals sold through platforms such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo. An online order still ended with somebody cooking. The screen made the dining room optional; it did little to diminish the importance of the kitchen.

Then Benoit and Haggai changed the arrangement. Restaurants already had equipment, staff and space. Instead of continuing to build a separate network, Not So Dark could offer those operators additional brands to prepare alongside their existing menus. The company began moving toward that partnership model during 2021.

For a founder, abandoning infrastructure already built is a particularly unforgiving form of editing. The earlier work is visible. Money has been spent. People have organised their days around the plan. A revised presentation cannot make those commitments vanish. Choosing another model requires accepting that the first version has taught you something expensive.

A brand travels; a kitchen stays put

The partnership proposition had several parts. An established restaurant would prepare food for an additional delivery brand. Not So Dark supplied support around the brand, marketing, packaging and pricing. Delivery platforms connected the offer with customers. The restaurant could keep its own identity while taking on another line of business from the same premises.

That is a more complicated relationship than the word “virtual” suggests. The brand might be discovered online, but an operator has to fit its orders around the kitchen’s existing activity. A menu needs ingredients, instructions and consistency. A new source of demand is useful only when the people receiving it can carry out the work.

In September 2022, Not So Dark announced an $80 million Series B led by Kharis Capital and Verlinvest, with Convivialité Ventures participating. The money backed the next stage of the company’s European development. It followed a change in the proposition as consequential as any new market: restaurant owners had become the partners through which the business would expand.

In January 2023, the company became Clone. The new name followed the operating change. Its brands could be reproduced across partner locations, with technology and marketing supporting their presence on delivery platforms. The original name had referred to an earlier version of the business. The replacement gave the later one a shorter explanation.

The company’s present offer also includes physical franchises, alongside virtual brands for existing kitchens. Its website lists operations in four countries and a portfolio of 50 food brands, figures that describe a company still working across several markets. That matters to a story so often told through the decision to stop building kitchens. A company can make a defining change and continue changing afterward. Its website now presents restaurant owners with more than one route into the network.

For the restaurant owner, Clone now sets out support from configuring a kitchen to launching the offer. It presents a single interface covering supplies and performance indicators, with marketing managed centrally. These are the less photogenic parts of expansion: making the next location repeat the offer reliably, keeping ingredients available and giving an operator a way to see what is happening. They bring Benoit back to the operational details that connected his earlier businesses, where a promise to a customer becomes a task for somebody else.

Keeping the founder, changing the plan

Benoit’s own account of entrepreneurship leaves room for these revisions. In a January 2025 essay, he described four pivots at Clone over five years. He argued for clear, reachable objectives and adjusting a strategy as results arrive. The image he chose was sporting: building progress point by point, with the possibility of changing how the game is played.

He has also pushed back against treating money as the first reason to start. After selling companies, he still questions the choices surrounding those sales. The outcome may be attractive while the decision remains worth examining. His public reflections place conviction beside adaptability, and individual ambition beside the people needed to carry a business forward.

That combination gives his career its continuity. Benoit has moved among delivery networks, studios and restaurant brands, repeatedly organising businesses around other people’s skills and premises. At Fithouse, the empty shop was an opportunity. At Clone, the occupied kitchen became one. Between them lies the awkward, useful work of finding out which part of an idea deserves another room.