In 2008, two friends sat in a basement outside the tech spotlight and made a quiet bet: that live video, done right, could change how businesses fix things. It took five years before the bet paid off.
Thomas Cottereau did not arrive at software the fashionable way. Before SightCall, before the Bay Area and the enterprise logos, he was a telecommunications engineer working on the pipes underneath the internet itself. In the late 1990s he led the Southern Europe engineering group at UUNET, then the largest internet service provider on earth. When UUNET was folded into MCI WorldCom, he felt the culture shift from the fast, improvised internet world into the slower machinery of traditional telecom. He kept building anyway.
That grounding matters, because SightCall is essentially a telecom problem wearing a software coat. Cottereau holds a Master's in Computer Science from Telecom Lille 1 in France, and across roughly fifteen years he moved through engineering, marketing and business development. Between the big telecom names, he spent about five years helping grow Niji, a French software and consulting firm focused on digital convergence, expanding it from a few dozen people into a company of several hundred. By the time he started his own thing, he had seen how large, complicated technical projects actually get delivered - and how often they stall.
The basement blueprint
Cottereau co-founded the company - originally called Weemo - with Antoine Vervoort, a friend from school. The early design work happened in the evenings, in a friend's basement, and from the start he set three rules that would define the product for years. First, full virtualization: no dependence on special hardware. Second, no silos between voice, video and text. Third, an API-first approach to reaching customers. The prototype came together in about four months. The version enterprises could actually trust took five years.
The gap between those two numbers is the whole story. He was trying to fuse two worlds that had historically ignored each other - telecommunications and software engineering - and there was no shortcut through it. "It's harder after the fundraising than to get the fundraising by itself," he has said, and the build reflected that patience long before the money arrived.
Persistence as a business plan
If there is a single trait that runs through every SightCall milestone, it is a refusal to accept the first no. The seed round is the cleanest example. Cottereau sent an investor five emails and got silence. The sixth - candid, a little frustrated, done being polite - finally got a reply, and the roughly one-million-euro round followed. He tends to trust straight talk over corporate pleasantries, and it kept working.
The same instinct moved his family across the world. In 2013 he relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and set his sights on a Salesforce partnership, showing up at their office close to every week until he earned a meeting. A working demo did the rest, and the relationship opened the door to HP as an early flagship customer - a company whose hardware support costs made the value of live visual assistance obvious. From there the customer list grew to include names like GE Healthcare and Whirlpool.
The crisis that named the company
Not every turn was smooth. An aggressive cease-and-desist letter over the Weemo name arrived from a large U.S. company. Rather than fold, Cottereau leaned on an earlier European trademark to negotiate a transition period, then rebranded to SightCall. He describes the forced change as a gift in disguise: the new name pointed straight at what the company actually did - let people see, together, in real time. A legal threat became a moment of clarity.
The hard part comes after the check
Cottereau is unusually honest about scaling. Every funding round, he found, brought its own predictable trouble - organizational silos, internal politics, and after the Series A a genuine sales-versus-marketing standoff when a new pricing strategy clashed with how enterprise deals actually closed. Bringing in seasoned executives to speed things up sometimes slowed them down instead. He read Ben Horowitz's "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" and stopped partway through, unsure whether the parallels to his own struggles would steady his nerve or shake it.
Through the grind, he kept one foot outdoors. He is an avid mountain biker and connects the sport directly to the work: real effort, technical difficulty, and risk you learn to manage rather than avoid. It is the same equation as building a company, and he credits it with keeping him level. He also uses a French expression that translates roughly to "standing straight in your boots" - his shorthand for holding to your principles when the pressure argues otherwise.
Teaching machines to see the field
Today SightCall sits at the intersection of augmented reality, computer vision and generative AI, used to guide field technicians, inspect insurance claims, and support customers who would otherwise wait for a truck to roll. Cottereau's view of AI is characteristically grounded. "Before you can trust AI to make decisions, you need to train it on the truth," he has said. "That means capturing what's really happening in the field." The visual data his platform collects is, in his telling, the raw material that makes automation trustworthy rather than guesswork.
His work has drawn a shelf of recognition along the way - the 2015 Dell Innovation Award, the 2016 Comcast Innovation Award, the 2017 Amdocs Innovation in Practice Award, the 2017 Graham Bell Award, and the 2018 NTT Data Open Innovation San Francisco Award. Beyond SightCall, he has advised Bay Area startups and mentored product design at UC Berkeley, passing along the mix of engineering discipline and stubbornness that got a basement prototype to customers on every continent.
The thread from UUNET to SightCall is a straight one. He helped build the internet, then built something useful on top of it, and did it by refusing to leave when the answer was no. Seventeen years on from that basement, the bet looks a lot less quiet.