Two entrepreneurs, one passion: Eric La Bonnardière and Yvan Wibaux, co-founders of Evaneos.
This is the story of two young travel-lovers, Eric La Bonnardière and Yvan Wibaux, who set about looking for entrepreneurial challenges. After graduating from Supelec and HEC Paris, Eric spent two years working as a strategy consultant. As a seasoned globetrotter, he wanted to find a way of bringing together his love of travel and his business skills. Eric left his job as a consultant and found a new associate, Yvan Wibaux, who had not only a degree from Central Paris under his belt, but a year of travelling the world working in water control and responsible tourism.
Together, they spent nine months coming up with a business concept and breathing life into it. Finally, in June 2009, they took up the direction of Evaneos.
Evaneos is the first online platform connecting travellers directly with ‘the local experts,’ 1000 hand-picked, on-site travel agents in over 160 destinations across the globe. As one of the leading online travel players in Europe, Evaneos allows holidaymakers to design 100% tailor-made trips securely through local travel agencies, and this platform is set to revolutionise the way travellers book their discovery and adventure holidays. At 8 years since the conception of Evaneos, the company now consists of an international team of about 80 people and is present across five European markets (France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the UK). Thanks to its unique, 100% customisable trips, the Evaneos team has enabled more than 160,000 travellers to realise their dream holiday!
Structure and Simplicity: The Dataiku Story
Dataiku’s story begins in Paris in 2013. The founding team, Florian Douetteau, Thomas Cabrol, Clément Sténac, and Marc Batty set out to fill a void in the big data space, providing one tool that would allow data science teams to clean, visualize, model, and deploy data projects all in one place. In 2014, the team launched the very first version of Dataiku Data Science Studio (DSS), which focused on helping data science teams use predictive models to build business applications. Dataiku DSS’s early success proved that facilitating data projects from one simple tool was crucial to business’ maturation and advancement in data ventures, and for its first two years, Dataiku grew rapidly based on this premise. In addition to new customers, Dataiku also grew its network of partners, starting to build a trusted ecosystem with which to better serve that customer base.
Dataiku continued to release new versions of Dataiku DSS with improvements and additional features, and in 2015, they raised €3.6 million from two investors, including Serena Capital. With Serena Capital’s support, guidance, communication, and facilitation, later that year, Dataiku was able to expand and opened an office in New York City, spurring even more growth as the big data buzzword gained more hype and attention across the globe.
By 2016, Dataiku had become an integral part of large data teams at companies like L’Oreal, AXA or vente-privee, allowing them to seamlessly integrate machine learning and predictive analytics into their products. By this time, the Dataiku team had also grown to 60 across Paris and New York offices, allowing for continued, rapid growth and brand awareness to spread as the year went on.
The team’s growth and success culminated in October 2016 with a $14 million Series A round led by FirstMark Capital. The team is posed to show the industry that Dataiku is a top player, and they are ready to show the world that machine learning and big data don’t have to be messy and complicated in order to find success in data projects. Going into 2017, Dataiku makes its debut as highest in execution in “Completeness of Vision” in the Gartner 2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Science Platforms and continues to expand all its locations bringing its passion for simple, structured data projects to even more industries and companies across the globe.
iContainers was founded by two Spanish entrepreneurs who learned the hard way that the shipping industry was out-of-date. When a client at a former Barcelona-based business venture called for an update on a freight shipment, Iván Tintore and Carlos Hernández realized to their dismay that they couldn’t get ahold of the agent. When they were unable to get ahold of the information the client was asking, relatively basic things like the cost, or whether there was an alternative route, the client went to another firm. Tintore and Hernández then realized that the shipping industry’s lack of transparency signalled an enormous opportunity.
As of 2016, iContainers now has 40 employees with offices in Miami, Barcelona, and Ahmedabad, India and has shipped more than 20,000 containers across 9.8 million nautical miles worldwide. One key to iContainers’ rapid growth: its pioneering of door-to-door shipping, as opposed to simply shipping containers from port-to-port. The company aggregates rates and pricing for roughly 95% of the shipping businesses in today’s market, finally bringing price transparency to the $300 billion logistics industry for the first time. Earlier this year, iContainers brought Jaime Jiménez, a seasoned founder and CEO with a demonstrated background in disrupting dated industries. Together, they are helping everyone from families and small businesses to Fortune 500 companies handle all their shipping needs through a single company, using iContainers’ simple and intuitive website and apps.
In 2010, Work4 was created on a simple but brilliant idea: leverage social media to connect recruiters and candidates. Stephane Le Viet & Gautier Machelon, the founders of Multiposting, first thought of Work4 when tackling the expansion of their first company. They decided the impact on the market would be so significant that creating an entirely new company was in order. Work4 was created to develop social-media-powered solutions to connect organizations & talent on a global scale.
In just four short years, Gautier and Stephane opened offices in Paris and San Francisco, raised more than $20M, and recruited top-notch employees to develop their must-have recruiting solutions. Work4 first launched their Facebook Career Application in 2010, enabling companies to mirror their career website on Facebook and enabling recruiters to share their job offers directly on their Corporate Facebook page. Convinced that they should take advantage of the “social” nature of these networks, Work4’s team quickly added a revolutionary referral tool – Social Job Sharing.
At the end of 2014, after re-assessing Work4’s vision, they created a new product that would quickly answer their clients’ needs – Social Job Posting. Since 2015, Social Job Posting has enabled recruiters to advertise their open jobs to thousands of targeted candidates via automated and optimized ad campaigns.
As of today, Work4 empowers more than 1,000 clients to recruit on social media on a global scale. The company numbers more than 40 employees, working in both the Paris and San Francisco offices. In 2016, more than 40,000 open positions were promoted using Social Job Posting and the Facebook Career Application, generating an average of 10,000 applications every day!
In 2017, Work4’s vision is to build even more innovative technologies to enhance our customers’ recruiting processes. Seamless integration of Work4’s products on social platforms, optimization of campaign performance, and perhaps even facilitating the candidate’s journey via Facebook bots. Thanks to these innovative recruiting technologies, Work4 is on its way to be a must-have solution for every recruiter.
June 2013 : three experienced managers and Digital experts- Jean-Marc Tassetto and Arnauld Mitre, former Google executives, and Frédérick Benichou, web entrepreneur – realize how boring and inefficient e-learning 1.0 is. Inspired by the MOOC revolution, they imagine an innovative, user-centric instructional design dedicated to corporate training, nourished by exchanges with Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s labs (including the Center for Digital Education, and the Computer-Human Interaction in Learning & Instruction lab). This is the birth of Coorpacademy, the leading European B2B EdTech (Education Technology) startup.
Today, the startup works with 40% of the CAC 40 and major Fortune 500 companies. They count 400 000 learners among which almost 40% outside Europe.
Coorpacademy has developed two masterclasses designed to empower businesses facing major transformations – Digital, technological, energetic, managerial…: « Digital Culture », already followed by 50 000 learners, and « Zeitgeist », created with prestigious partners. Smaller companies can also access them on Coorpacademy’s public platform: www.coorpacademy.com.
In addition, Coorpacademy has designed more than 50 customized courses on various themes including project management, sales, compliance, employer brand, employee onboarding…
After three years, Coorpacademy has been distinguished by Frenchweb as the most promising French B2B EdTech, by the Swiss Federation for Adult Learning with the Prix Alice 2016, and it has been selected as a finalist of the 2016 Swiss Venture Club award. With its September 2016 fundraising, Coorpacademy will invest in keeping its technological and R&D edge, embarking on its international expansion, and developing its partnership program.
Founded in 2009 by Mickael Froger and Jérémy Peiro, Lengow is an ecommerce automation solution that helps brands and distributors improve their performance, automate their business processes and grow internationally. Intuitive and innovative, the Lengow platform is the key that opens the door to strong profitability and visibility for products sold by online retailers around the world on all distribution channels: marketplaces, comparison shopping engines, affiliate platforms and display/retargeting. With more than 1,800 partners that have been collaborating with Lengow since 2009, the SaaS solution offers a powerful ecosystem to the 3,600 merchants that use it in 45 countries across the globe.
Today the solution works in France and around the world. Following a €10 million fundraising campaign in September 2015, notably with Serena Capital, Lengow is expanding its strategy: penetrating new international markets, particularly in Asia and strengthening its market share in Europe with the opening of offices in Germany. Beyond its conquest of new markets, Lengow is also making a real technological shift by evolving its solution towards an e-commerce automation platform responding to the challenges of performance, automation and internationalization of online brands and distributors.
Since creating Lengow in 2009, CEO Mickaël Froger has been committed to contributing to the construction and consolidation of the digital ecosystem. In addition to its activity, he hopes that Lengow will add value to a local, national and even wider ecosystem, a commitment demonstrated by the launch of an incubator within the company offices that supports young entrepreneurs. With this in mind, every year Lengow also organises a full-day conference dedicated to the retail and ecommerce industry, sharing trends and good practices within the sector.
Key figures 2017
