Denis Branthonne and the art of starting over

Denis Branthonne had already learned how to build a submarine when he decided to build a software company. Between those two occupations came strategy consulting, a mobile-mapping startup, a move to Singapore, and a senior job at Autodesk. A respectable career could have stopped there. His kept requiring a fresh set of instructions.

At 43, he left the corporate position and began again. Novade started operating in 2014 with a small team on the ninth floor of an industrial building in Singapore. The setting suits the business: an enterprise software company learning its trade by watching people do physical work. The founders spent hours on construction sites, trying to understand the routines their software would eventually serve.

That beginning offers a useful way into Branthonne’s story. His career moves across countries and industries, but keeps returning to a practical question: how does work actually get done? A drawing can describe a finished object. Getting people, materials and decisions to arrive in the right order requires rather more cooperation.

A trade, a submarine, a second beginning

He grew up in France, in a family where university was far from an automatic next step. His parents had left school at 14. He credits them with teaching honesty, fairness and curiosity, and credits public education with opening a route beyond the working life he had expected to inherit. These are unusually concrete debts for a founder to acknowledge.

His education began at the École de l’Arsenal in Cherbourg, continued at ENSTA ParisTech and took him to MIT. He returned to France and worked on submarine development, including technical responsibility for the Scorpène programme. Three-dimensional design and prefabrication were part of the job. He was seeing industrial methods change from inside the organisation responsible for putting them to use.

Marriage in 1999 preceded another change. He left defence, entered strategy consulting in Paris and later worked in mobile mapping. When his wife took an important role in Singapore, they moved. Finding his own opening took nine months. Autodesk hired him in business development; he eventually became vice-president for Asia and emerging markets. He left in 2013. The subsequent startup would put his experience of industrial change to a different test.

A phone belongs on the site

Branthonne’s argument for construction software begins with the people working outside the office. In his writing, he describes a sector organised around individual projects, shifting suppliers and numerous separate firms. Getting a new process adopted across that arrangement is a coordination problem. A technically impressive system can still struggle if the people who control schedules and costs have little reason to change their routines.

He had watched manufacturing use digital models and improve production methods. Construction had adopted tools for design, but the activity on site presented another challenge. Equipment, materials and workers had to be coordinated; inspections and reports still generated paper. Carrying a laptop around the job was hardly an elegant answer. The smartphone offered a device workers already understood and could keep with them.

This was the opening he pursued at Novade. Phones could capture information where work happened and make it available to the wider team. The attraction was wonderfully ordinary: fewer journeys to find a record, less copying between forms, a clearer account of what had been completed. An industry making permanent structures could finally give its information a little mobility.

The paperwork has formidable market share

Asked about competition, Branthonne named “Excel, paper, and WhatsApp.” It is a compact description of the incumbent. Spreadsheets and messages are familiar, flexible and already available. A new application must give people a reason to leave that comfort, especially when they have a project to deliver and little appetite for another system to learn.

His early customers brought a surprise. He had expected smaller businesses, yet large contractors and developers became central to Novade’s clientele. By the January 2023 interview, the company employed 140 people across 20 countries and counted about 200 enterprise clients. Those figures describe that period, when enterprise projects had become a substantial part of the business.

The product’s design allowed processes to be configured for different projects and countries. In a separate interview, he explained why a shared platform mattered: disconnected specialist applications made people enter the same information repeatedly. Novade connected field activities and allowed clients to start with a project or module, then expand. That sequence gave a customer something manageable to try before making a broader commitment.

“Excel, paper, and WhatsApp.”

Denis Branthonne, on the competition · 2023

An engineer’s case for asking people

His advice on introducing new technology is refreshingly interested in the people asked to use it. In 2017, he urged companies to begin with a pilot, choose the team carefully and decide in advance how success would be measured. A first deployment should help reveal priorities that an elaborate specification cannot reliably anticipate. Learning continues as more processes are digitised.

He also pushed back against treating age as the explanation for resistance. In his experience, a willing veteran can make a particularly effective adopter because that person knows the process, can simplify it and understands the result the team needs. Hands-on training, clear responsibilities and experienced colleagues can do more for adoption than assuming younger staff will somehow carry everyone along.

There is a humane economy in this approach. The worker’s attention is a resource too. Each extra screen, duplicate entry or unexplained instruction spends some of it. Branthonne’s writing asks managers to keep systems simple as they grow. The software gets a better chance when the organisation can explain what it is for and who is supposed to do what.

The small office had an international plan

Novade’s co-founder Eugene Low brought a different sort of experience: an entrepreneurial career providing construction software in the region. Branthonne brought experience managing international operations. Their partnership depended on complementary knowledge and mutual respect. A founder who understands large organisations and a founder who has built businesses can agree on the destination while contributing different maps.

The company signed its first Malaysian contract in 2015 and its first European contracts in 2016. International feedback came early, before the product became too closely fitted to one country. Singapore offered access to sites and global contractors, but growth would require customers beyond its borders. Winning an enterprise account involved proving the product on successive projects and allowing trust to accumulate.

An interesting return followed in August 2021: Novade announced an integration with Autodesk Construction Cloud. Information could move between Novade and BIM 360, connecting field processes with the wider project environment. Branthonne’s former employer had become part of his company’s integration strategy. The career detour had brought him back to a familiar name, with a different job to accomplish.

Room for the smaller builder

Enterprise customers did not end the question of whom Novade could serve. In August 2022, it formally launched Novade Lite for specialist trades, subcontractors and home builders. Branthonne described their workflows as distinct and existing solutions as frequently too expensive or poorly suited to the job. The aim was to adapt experience from the enterprise product to a smaller operation.

The launch put everyday coordination at the centre: project progress, inspections, resources and access to current documents. A contractor working across several jobs needs a common place for drawings and updates just as a large organisation does. The scale changes; the annoyance of discovering that someone has worked from an old document remains recognisable.

His concern with the cost of administration has continued. In a recent public post, he considered two possible effects of generative AI on compliance. It could make producing procedures so easy that organisations create more bureaucracy. It could also help them simplify controls and reduce the effort of managing them. He presents the outcome as a choice organisations will have to make. The machine can write another policy very quickly; somebody still has to read it.

Curiosity travels better than a job title

Outside the office, his published biography takes a less predictable itinerary: rafting the Zambezi, paragliding over Rio and crossing the Sahara in a Renault 4L. Those adventures belong to the same life as submarine design and software sales. They make a pleasingly untidy list for someone whose business depends on bringing order to records.

His attachment to MIT has lasted. After attending a session with Sally Kornbluth, he wrote about climate research, the energy requirements of AI and the place of science in addressing practical problems. He also recalled meeting his wife there. A university can send a graduate away with both a technical education and a rather consequential change of plans.

In Singapore, he has helped create a setting where other founders compare their own plans. He co-presides over the French Chamber’s CEO Tech Club alongside Eric Barbier and JC Bouglé. In February 2023, he hosted a workshop at Novade on software-as-a-service, with participants sharing successes and failures. The founder with several beginnings behind him was making space for others to discuss the messy parts of theirs.

He has also taken the interviewer’s chair himself. In a conversation with Khun Pasas of Thailand’s VR Digital, Branthonne asked about changing technology, organisational habits and the investment needed for innovation. His introduction described those conversations as a chance to learn. The questions extend the site visits: listen to people who know their working environment before deciding what should change.

Another chapter, with the same first question

Novade now reports operations in 25 countries, with 150,000 users across 10,000 sites and a million processes each month. Its public description includes building, infrastructure, energy, utilities and industrial work. The original observation of daily routines has become a platform used across a wider range of physical operations.

Branthonne’s current writing on AI remains preoccupied with those routines. He argues that inconsistent execution and fragmented information limit what a model can deliver. Companies getting useful results have standardised processes, collected structured information where the work happens and encouraged adoption across projects. The order matters. New analytical tools depend on the habits that produce their inputs.

That is a recognisable continuation of his earlier work. He has moved from industrial design to regional leadership to founding a company, and from mobile forms towards AI. Across those changes, his interest stays with the point where a plan meets the person expected to carry it out. The next beginning still has a place to start: go to the site, ask a question, and pay attention to the answer.