Latest Interviews

Contentsquare & Eurazeo: From Data Rich to AI Smart Reinventing a Scale Up in Real Time

Anne-Charlotte Filbert, Ilan, Remy

Eurazeo's Anne-Charlotte Filbert and Content Square's Ilan analyzed the latter's strategic pivot from a traditional analytics provider to an AI-native platform following a 2023 acquisition of Heap. Driven by CEO John, the company restructured its organizational culture and product roadmap to prioritize agentic workflows, launching proactive "Sense" insights while implementing strict security protocols for tools like Gemini and Dust. The discussion concluded that future market survival hinges on the "velocity" of leadership to transform late-stage enterprises, contrasting Content Square's scale with the agility required for AI-native success.

A Fireside Chat with Sébastien Verger, CTO at Dell Technologies ft.The French Tech Journal

Sébastien Verger, Francois Beaufort

Dell positioned AI as a core strategic pillar through its "Dell AI Factory," addressing the critical challenge where 80% of proof-of-concepts fail to reach production by emphasizing data quality and secure on-premises deployment. The company highlighted its logistical prowess in rapidly scaling infrastructure for partners like XAI and Mistral AI while launching tools such as Dell Pro AI Studio to enable local model execution on AI PCs. Looking toward the next five years, Dell anticipates healthcare breakthroughs in personalized cancer treatments and champions sovereign European data strategies to ensure sustainable, responsible AI governance.

Adrian McDermott, CTO, Zendesk: What CX Teaches Us About AI And The Future Of Work

Adrian McDermott, Joseph

During a presentation on enterprise AI transformation, Zendesk representatives detailed how their platform now supports 15,000 generative AI users and redefines customer service as a critical revenue engine where 94% of value derives from support interactions. The company outlined a strategic shift toward outcome-based pricing and the development of voice-enabled agents, aiming to reduce the customer service market's dependence on human labor by the end of the decade. Data from 33 million analyzed tickets suggests that AI will primarily address upstream business failures and low-value queries, allowing human agents to focus on high-empathy tasks that prevent churn.

Neo4j, Eurazeo Growth: Connected Intelligence Why Graph Technology Is the Missing Link in GenAI

Romain, Philippe

Eurasio Fund identified graph technology as essential for bridging the gap between GenAI prototypes and production environments, a strategy validated by Gartner's finding that knowledge graphs increase success rates by 80%. Major enterprises like Klarna now leverage this approach to eliminate thousands of legacy applications and accelerate processing speeds by 1,000 times, while Neo4j serves as the underlying infrastructure for 84 Fortune 100 companies. The industry further solidified this shift in 2023 when the ISO standardized the Cypher query language as GQL, cementing graph databases as a critical component for explainability and security in complex AI systems.

Stephane Kasriel, Meta Fundamental AI Research (FAIR): Frontier AI From Research to Production

Stephane Kasriel, Stefan, Stephen Beyrer, Romain Guyett

Stefan Beirer leads Meta's Fundamental AI Research division in a $60 billion infrastructure expansion aimed at transitioning AI from academic theory to consumer-scale products through a Bell Labs-style model. This strategy leverages the open-source Llama ecosystem and real-time emotional avatars to drive global adoption while refuting immediate mass displacement fears by citing current hardware limitations. Beirer projects that massive compute investments will drive inference costs down by up to 1,000x within two years, enabling "always-on" devices and accelerating a decade of technological progress comparable to the first industrial revolution.

Ronan Harris (Snap Inc): Bringing AI into the world through augmented reality ft. Bloomberg News

Ronan Harris, Benoit

Snap plans to launch new consumer Spectacles next year while leveraging a platform strategy that currently supports 8 billion daily augmented reality lens uses among its 900 million users. The company is differentiating itself from hardware-focused competitors by fostering a developer ecosystem of 400,000 creators and integrating AI partners like Google and OpenAI to drive both ad targeting and third-party experiences. Despite facing stock declines and layoffs, Snap's leadership argues that adopting machine learning and resisting strict age bans are essential for maintaining market relevance against major global competitors.

Windsurf, BUZZ HPC, Gnosis, ElevenLabs, Prosus & Bloomberg: The Agentic Economy AI’s Unseen Hand

Rachel Metz, Tim Cowley, Jero, Alex, Matty, Maria Zuber, Matias Niemelaer, Andrzej Baliczak

A diverse panel of industry leaders from BuzzHPC, Prozus, Windsurf, and 11 Labs defined AI agents as autonomous systems requiring multi-modal feedback loops to drive enterprise adoption. Real-world deployments at companies like DHL and Prozus have demonstrated significant operational gains, including 20% faster delivery times and a 1.7 million-hour productivity increase, while OpenAI's $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf validates the technology's strategic value in software engineering. Despite hurdles regarding data disambiguation and regulatory compliance, the panel predicts a shift toward a task-based internet where agents outperform human operators in efficiency and revenue generation.

Base Power Raises $1B led by Addition, with Trust Ventures, Lightspeed, a16z, Altimeter, Elad Gil

Elad Gil, Zach Dell, Justin Lopas, Molly O'Shea

Base secured an oversubscribed $1 billion Series C led by Addition, accelerating from its previous $200 million round to fund its "Speed to Power" product designed to bypass traditional grid interconnection delays for data centers. Backed by strategic investors like Lennar and Starwood alongside founders from SpaceX and Tesla, the company is deploying gigawatt-scale battery capacity from its Austin "Factory One" at a target rate of 100 megawatts per month. This capital infusion supports a strategic pivot to replace fossil fuels with cost-efficient solar and storage, aiming to solve critical energy bottlenecks for AI development while expanding operations into high-solar states like California and Florida.

Sam Altman on Sora, Energy, and Building an AI Empire

Sam Altman, Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlines a strategic shift toward extreme vertical integration, establishing a massive global infrastructure stack to support research, consumer products, and hardware while securing partnerships with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. The organization prioritizes scientific advancement and world model development, predicting that within two years AI systems will autonomously conduct complex research in physics and biology, though this rapid scaling necessitates new per-generation monetization models. Concurrently, Altman advocates for a measured regulatory approach focused only on superhuman capabilities to avoid stifling innovation, while emphasizing that the ultimate economic value of this infrastructure lies in the successful and gradual deployment of artificial general intelligence.

Mark Carney on dealing with Donald Trump

Mark Carney, Donald Trump, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Prime Minister Carney, Sani

Prime Minister Carney attributes Canada's recent economic stagnation to persistent tariff uncertainty while characterizing U.S. trade policy as a coercive "mafioso" strategy driven by President Trump. In response to this geopolitical rupture, Ottawa is pivoting toward strategic sovereignty by bolstering Arctic defense and cultivating a "variable geometry" of trade alliances to reduce reliance on the American market. This dual approach acknowledges a permanent shift toward high-tariff U.S. protectionism, compelling Canada to prioritize self-sufficiency and diversify global partnerships beyond traditional transatlantic frameworks.

A fireside Chat with Mati Staniszewski, CEO & Co-Founder of Eleven Labs ft. Balderton Capital

Mati Staniszewski, James Wise

Founded by Mati Kovacs and Peter, Eleven Labs has evolved from addressing Polish film dubbing limitations into a global AI voice leader operating with offices in the US, Europe, India, and Japan. The company currently executes a dual strategy of frontier research and application development, delivering production-ready voice agents for healthcare scheduling and interactive entertainment while distinguishing itself through high-fidelity dialect recognition and a creator marketplace that has paid over $5 million. Looking forward, leadership is prioritizing a three-tier trust framework for safety and a technical pivot toward combining cascaded reliability with end-to-end Duplex models to achieve human-like latency in the coming year.

Paul Copplestone (SupaBase) & Abel Samot (Commit): Open Source Backend for the AI Age

Paul Copplestone, Abel Samot, DAN GALPIN, FRANCESC CAMPOY, ALEXIS MOUSSINE

Supabase has achieved a $2 billion valuation following a $200 million funding round, driven by a user base that tripled to over 3 million developers and a strategy positioning the open-source platform as a default modern web backend. Founder Paul Copplestone highlights rapid adoption fueled by AI-assisted "vibe coding" tools while the company pursues enterprise growth through "configuration over customization" and upcoming infrastructure breakthroughs like the Multigress sharding solution. Operating as a fully remote organization of 140 specialists, the firm continues scaling by launching Pico instances for zero-to-one applications and recruiting senior talent to support petabyte-scale database capabilities.

Scaleway & SemiAnalysis: Unlocking AI's Potential Insights from Deploying Europe's Most Advanced

Scaleway launched Europe's largest Hopper GPU cluster in 2023 to secure data sovereignty and prevent U.S. hyperscaler dominance, now hosting major AI players like Mistral for training and inference. The provider is advancing "Project ION," a consortium-backed initiative aiming to build capacity equivalent to 280,000 H100 chips with private capital while seeking government demand assurance rather than direct subsidies. Operating across five European regions, Scaleway positions itself as a full-stack public cloud solution that prioritizes legal immunity from U.S. laws over domestic hardware manufacturing, targeting a consolidated market of EU-based public and private AI consumers.

A fireside Chat with May Habib, CEO & Co Founder of Writer ft. Rana Yared, GP, Balderton Capital

May Habib, Rana Yared

Writer is an enterprise AI company accelerating the transition to "Era 3.0" agentic systems by deploying vertically specific, revenue-impacting solutions that integrate with legacy infrastructure while maintaining full-stack control over security and reliability. The organization addresses adoption barriers like traceability and scalability through a frugal, synthetic-data-driven architecture that enables rapid model iteration and distinct competitive moats against infrastructure providers. By structuring implementation around 30-to-365-day value increments, Writer facilitates deep corporate transformation from efficiency tools to autonomous agents capable of executing complex, high-stakes business workflows.

Poolside AI, IREN, Forbes: From 10x to 100x Building AI Systems for Real World Scale

Emma Allen, Dennis Skriniop, Isa Kent

Dennis Skriniop of Iron and Isa Kent of Poolside discuss the critical infrastructure and energy requirements for scaling foundation models toward human-level intelligence. Kent outlines Poolside's $500 million investment in automating a "model factory" that executes 1,800 monthly experiments, emphasizing that 80% of success relies on distributed systems engineering rather than algorithmic discovery. Skriniop and Kent further analyze the necessity of hybrid power grids, disaggregated storage architectures, and the emerging role of specialized "Neo-Clouds" to address the exponential complexity of operating clusters exceeding 10,000 GPUs.