2014 - The Meeting
Two Engineers, One Shared Passion
Passionate about coding since childhood, our founders Jean Ashton and Arnaud Albalat met at École Polytechnique, graduating in 2014. They share the same passion for innovation and technical challenges, and quickly became friends. Jean completed his training at EPFL. Arnaud, top of his class at l'X, specialised in artificial intelligence within the MVA master's programme at ENS. They then embarked on their first scientific and technical challenges.
A Stint at Big Tech Groups Before Choosing Entrepreneurship
Jean joined research at IBM, where he designed a travel time prediction model aimed at reducing urban traffic. Arnaud also started in research at Facebook, where he developed a confidence measure for voice recognition based on a neural network, then tried his hand at software development at Microsoft, where he developed algorithms for generating music playlists. But these large organisations soon left them wanting more: there were numerous constraints, limited freedom of action and a slow execution pace, sometimes with several months' wait before an algorithm reached production.
The Institutions and Companies That Shaped Our Founders
They then decided to partner up to start a venture together. Their first project was a SaaS software for predicting attendance for cinemas. The product worked, but the market was narrow and the sector weakened by the rise of streaming. They sold the solution and went in search of a new playing field.
