paris-startup
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David Dokes
David Dokes is the co-founder and CEO of Polar Analytics, a first-party data and business intelligence platform built for Shopify and direct-to-consumer brands. Before Polar, he led growth at car-sharing marketplace Turo, where he ran a roughly $20M annual marketing budget. He teamed up with former Airbnb data scientist Charbel Seif in 2020 to give smaller retailers the kind of enterprise-grade data infrastructure that big companies take for granted, unifying scattered marketing, sales, and inventory data into one dashboard that installs in days rather than months. Under his leadership Polar has raised roughly $28.5M and now serves several thousand merchants across dozens of countries.
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.
Alexandre Pasquiou
Alexandre Pasquiou is the CEO and co-founder of Neuralk-AI, a Paris deeptech building tabular foundation models - AI designed natively for the spreadsheets, SQL tables and product catalogs that run real businesses. A CentraleSupelec engineer with a PhD in computational neuroscience from Inria, he spent his doctorate measuring how well language models like GPT-2 and BERT predict human brain activity, then turned that obsession with structured signal into a company. Founded in 2023 with Antoine Moissenot, Neuralk raised a $4M seed in early 2025 led by Fly Ventures, backed by angels including Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf and Mirakl's Philippe Corrot, and works with retailers like E.Leclerc and Auchan.
David Chevalier
David Chevalier is the co-founder and CEO of Surfe, a Paris-born sales-tech company that bridges LinkedIn and the CRM. He and Romain Ginestou dreamed up the tool during an exchange at UC Berkeley after getting fed up with copy-pasting prospects into their CRM. Launched as Leadjet, the company bootstrapped to over 1,500 paying customers and 1M EUR ARR with no sales team before rebranding to Surfe and raising a 4M EUR seed round in 2022. Customers include Google, Uber, Spendesk, Mirakl and Opendoor. Chevalier is a vocal advocate for keeping the human in B2B selling, even as he builds tools to automate the busywork around it.