He left leveraged finance because he was bored. He came back with a Chrome extension that ate the part of selling everyone hates.
Open LinkedIn. Find a promising buyer. Now alt-tab to the CRM, retype the name, the title, the company, the email you only half-remember, and hope you didn't already log this person last Tuesday. Every salesperson on earth has done this dance. David Chevalier decided to delete it.
Today he runs Surfe, the Paris-born software that drops your CRM directly onto the LinkedIn page in front of you. One click adds a contact. The deal stage shows up where you actually work. Messages sync themselves. The busywork that used to eat a rep's afternoon disappears into the background, which is exactly where Chevalier thinks it belongs.
The thing he keeps repeating, oddly for someone building automation, is a warning against it: never automate the human connection. Surfe automates the typing, the syncing, the logging - the mechanical residue around a sale. The conversation stays human. That tension, machines for the boring parts and people for the rest, is the whole philosophy in one sentence.
The CRM should be where the relationships happen.
Before any of this, Chevalier spent about five years in M&A and leveraged finance. Good money, sharp suits, real skills. Then the restlessness set in. He left for HEC Paris, picked up a deep-tech entrepreneurship track, and shipped off to UC Berkeley on exchange as a visiting scholar in the Learn2Launch program.
At Berkeley he met Romain Ginestou. The two used LinkedIn relentlessly to find people - and hated the part where they had to feed everything back into a CRM by hand. So they built a small tool to do it for them. There was no grand plan. As Chevalier puts it, Surfe was founded with no plan, just a need.
They launched it as Leadjet, expecting maybe twenty people would care. Then COVID turned every sales team into a remote sales team, a Product Hunt launch lit the fuse, and a side project quietly became a business with paying customers who refused to leave.
Two HEC students on exchange at Berkeley, annoyed by the same chore. One stayed annoyed enough to fix it for everyone. The other built it with him.
Leadjet sounded like a tool. Surfe sounds like a wave you ride with other people. Chevalier wanted sales teams to feel that same unity and togetherness - so they rebranded.
This is how Surfe was founded: no plan, just a need.
Roughly five years in M&A and leveraged finance. Then he gets bored and walks away.
HEC Paris, deep-tech track. Exchange at UC Berkeley, where he meets Romain Ginestou and the idea is born.
Leadjet launches. Product Hunt and remote-work tailwinds turn a side project into traction.
1,500+ customers and ~1M EUR ARR, bootstrapped. Leadjet rebrands to Surfe.
4M EUR seed round led by 360 Capital, with TS Ventures and angels from Personio and Tenable.
Surfe opens a New York office and pushes into the US market.
Most startups raise first and find customers later. Chevalier did it in reverse - customers, revenue, profitability, then a check. The bars below tell that story.
Bars are illustrative, scaled for comparison - not to a single axis.
Typing, syncing, logging, deduping. The mechanical residue around a sale is fair game for software. Surfe exists to make it vanish.
"Never automate the human connection." The conversation, the trust, the read of a room - that stays a person's job.
The CRM shouldn't be a graveyard you fill in after the fact. It should be where the relationships live, visible to the whole team.
The CRM should be where the relationships happen.
Never automate the human connection.
We want sales teams to feel the same unity and togetherness when using our platform.
Good stories travel. Send David's down the line.