french-tech
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Alix de Sagazan Built a Company on a Radical Habit: Stop Guessing
She turned a frustrating handoff between marketers and developers into a global software business. Sixteen years later, her operating system still begins with a test, a team, and the nerve to learn in public.
Adrien Menard
He noticed that half the internet's pages were invisible to Google. Then he built a company to fix it - and now he is betting it can do the same for the AI agents rewriting how the world searches.
Pierre Dubuc
He was 11 when he started building a website to teach people how to code. Two decades later that hobby is OpenClassrooms, and Pierre Dubuc still measures its worth in one thing - jobs.
Cyril Daloz
Cyril Daloz is the founder and CEO of iObeya, a French enterprise software company that digitizes the Japanese lean concept of the Obeya, a visual war room, so distributed teams can run their planning, brainstorming and problem-solving rituals on shared virtual boards. After two decades in enterprise IT and a first company, KAP IT, Daloz spotted the idea in 2011 while helping PSA Peugeot Citroen digitize its physical visual-management rooms. He has since grown iObeya into a platform used by large manufacturers, banks and aerospace and defense organizations, raising $17 million in Series A funding and opening offices across Europe, Asia and the United States.
FX Leduc
François-Xavier (FX) Leduc is a French serial entrepreneur and CEO who builds AI companies that turn technical breakthroughs into products for large enterprises. He is currently co-founder and CEO of DeepIP, a New York-based AI patent assistant used by law firms and in-house IP teams, which he started in 2024 with longtime partner Edouard d'Archimbaud. The two previously built Kili Technology, a data-labeling platform for enterprise AI that raised over $30M and served customers like Airbus, SAP and Louis Vuitton. Across ventures, Leduc pairs a commercial, go-to-market instinct with a conviction that AI should augment expert professionals rather than replace them.
Thibaut Machet
Thibaut Machet is the CEO and co-founder of PlayPlay, a video creation platform that lets marketing, HR and communications teams turn text and raw clips into polished branded videos without editing skills. He started it in 2017 after six years running social media at Eurosport, grew it to roughly 240 employees across Paris, New York and Berlin, and raised a $55M Series B in 2022 led by Insight Partners. He now runs the company from New York, where he moved to build out the US business.
Ambre Soubiran
Ambre Soubiran is the CEO and chairman of Kaiko, the independent provider of institutional-grade, regulatory-compliant cryptocurrency market data and indices. After a decade structuring equity derivatives at HSBC in London and Paris, she walked away from traditional finance in 2016 to buy control of Kaiko - then a bright idea with no revenue and no staff - and built it into a global data business with roughly 130 people across New York, London, Paris and Singapore. She has raised over $80M and positions Kaiko as the trusted, neutral source of truth for crypto markets used by exchanges, asset managers and regulators.
Cédric Hutchings
Cédric Hutchings is a French serial entrepreneur and engineer who has spent two decades turning sensors into systems that change how the physical world gets understood. He co-founded Withings in 2008, building one of the first connected health companies from scratch to a €170M Nokia acquisition, then pivoted to co-found Outsight in 2019 - a Paris-based spatial intelligence company deploying 3D LiDAR software in airports, rail stations, and smart cities worldwide. Today, Outsight holds a $17.2M contract with Dallas Fort Worth Airport for the world's largest 3D LiDAR deployment, with installations at Charles de Gaulle and Rome Fiumicino airports among its growing portfolio.