Cyril Daloz

A wall of Post-its, and the idea he had been waiting for

In 2011, Cyril Daloz walked into a room at PSA Peugeot Citroen. The walls were covered in whiteboards, posters, colored indicators and Post-it notes. To the automaker it was a routine part of a lean transformation. To Daloz it was the product he had believed in for two decades.

The room was an Obeya, a Japanese lean concept meaning "big room," a physical space where teams gather to make their work visible and solve problems together. Toyota made it famous. Peugeot had brought Daloz's consulting firm in to help digitize theirs. Within that meeting, a decade-long conviction became a concrete plan.

The path there was patient. Daloz spent roughly twenty years inside large organizations, an e-business hosting manager at IBM around the turn of the millennium, then a software director at Metaware Technologies. He was not idling. He was, by his own account, waiting for the right idea and the right moment to build something of his own.

In 2005 he took the first step, co-founding KAP IT with Julien Revel. It was a software and consulting company built around Rich Internet Applications and data visualization, work that put it on the leading edge of the web at the time and earned a recognized Adobe partnership. The team of around fifty specialists delivered projects for names like Airbus, SNCF, Societe Generale and Thales. KAP IT was profitable, and it gave Daloz a base of engineers and a reputation with demanding enterprise clients.

But KAP IT was a services business, trading time for revenue. What Daloz kept circling back to was a bigger ambition: a global B2B software company built on strong human values, one that could scale without losing the human element that makes teams work. The Peugeot meeting handed him the vehicle.

The insight behind iObeya is deceptively simple. Visual management, standups, planning boards, problem-solving walls, works because people can see their work, point at it, move it around and argue in front of it. That physical, human quality is exactly what disappears the moment a team is split across cities and time zones. Daloz's bet was that you could move the wall onto a screen without killing the room.

So iObeya virtualizes the Obeya. It gives distributed teams shared digital boards for the same rituals they would run on a physical wall: agile ceremonies, brainstorming, lean meetings, Hoshin Kanri, SQCDP, value stream mapping. The design goal, repeated often, is to keep the "human-centric" side and the collective-intelligence approach intact rather than flattening them into another generic whiteboard tool.

That focus turned out to fit a specific kind of customer. iObeya's users cluster in industries where visual management is a discipline, not a fad: manufacturing, aerospace and defense, banking, pharmaceuticals. These are organizations that run their weeks on structured rituals and cannot afford to lose them when work goes remote or spans continents. For them, a faithful digital Obeya is infrastructure.

Scaling a quiet company

In July 2020, iObeya raised $17 million in a Series A round led by Red River West. The money funded a push into the United States, starting with an office in Seattle, and signaled that a category most people had never heard of was drawing real investor attention. The following stretch brought further expansion: by early 2022 the company announced five new offices across Singapore, New York, London, Hamburg and Rotterdam.

The headquarters, though, stayed in Massy, a suburb south of Paris rather than a central tech-hub address. It is a small detail that fits the founder. iObeya is not a company built on noise. It is built on a specific, slightly unglamorous conviction about how teams think best, carried patiently from a factory meeting to offices on three continents.

Daloz frames the long-term goal in broad terms. Visual management, in his telling, should not be confined to a single team's board. It should become a common visual language for the entire organization.

It is an ambitious frame for a tool that, at its heart, does something very old: puts people in a room, shows them their work, and lets them figure it out together. Daloz's contribution was noticing that the room did not have to be physical, and that the discipline inside it was worth building a company around.