In the 10 years since it launched in Paris, AI platform Dataiku has raised $850m from top-notch global investors such as Iconiq, Dawn Capital and Tiger Global; it counts major companies like Pfizer, LVMH and Toyota among its customers; and it announced at the end of 2022 that its valuation stands at $3.7bn, making it one of France’s highest-valued private tech businesses.
In the French startup ecosystem, those numbers are enough to make the company a household name.
The secret to success? Like many other businesses, a strong presence in the US. In 2016, Dataiku moved its headquarters to New York, primarily driven by the need to find more funding than could be offered by France’s then nascent VC scene.
Today, more than half of Dataiku’s $250m annual recurring revenue (ARR) comes from across the Atlantic, according to the company’s cofounder Florian Douetteau.
A third of the business’s 1,000-strong workforce — mostly R&D engineers and scientists — is still based in France, and Douetteau himself meets Sifted in central Paris, just a 10-minute walk from his flat.
Still, despite the business’s enduring ties to the mother country, it’s the kind of story that some may find reason to frown upon — at a time when the need to establish Europe’s digital sovereignty has never been more top-of-mind.
“No one openly criticised us for the move [to the US],” says Douetteau. “But it’s not like anyone congratulated us either.”
Leaving Europe
Potential moves away from the region by successful tech businesses — especially in AI, and especially to the US — are drawing intense scrutiny in Europe.
Earlier this year, French AI company Mistral signed a partnership with Microsoft that saw the US tech giant take a stake in the startup — a deal that was strongly criticised and saw some EU lawmakers demand an antitrust investigation.
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For Douetteau, it’s not the right battle to pick.
“What’s really at stake in the sovereignty question?” he asks. “I think it’s to have a flourishing ecosystem of entrepreneurs who are successful enough to create a culture of innovation and ambition.
“We need these European companies that find success by exporting to the US.”
Finding success in the US
Launched in 2013, Dataiku is a no-code platform intended to help companies that aren’t digital-native to implement AI models that are tailored to their needs.
It works mainly with large corporations in sectors like retail, industry and pharmaceuticals, which need to digitise in the face of competition while also sitting on heaps of data — often without having the expertise to use that data efficiently.
Many of these users are outside of France, says Douetteau.
“The French market is only a few percentage points of the global market,” he says.
“We have to accept that the early adopters of technology are often US companies. That’s linked to the size of the US ecosystem, their larger capacity to invest in technologies and the non-fragmentation of the market.”
For Douetteau, European tech companies have to leverage that opportunity if they are ever to become successful global leaders.
“We shouldn’t be naive,” he says. “We need to build long-term business models for companies with strong European roots, with a fundamentally European DNA — but that expand very quickly internationally.”
A European hustle culture?
It’s a delicate equation to balance — and one that raises the question of eventually ‘losing’ Europe-founded startups to bigger markets like the US.
But for Douetteau, it’s not about HQ locations, customer base or the geographical split of a cap table — but about creating examples of successful tech champions that can boost Europe’s next generation of startups.
This is the best way to build a strong culture of entrepreneurship on the continent, which the founder says is a key missing piece in European tech.
“We are now in an ecosystem that, in terms of funding or regulatory stability, is pretty much there,” says Douetteau.
“The key piece now is cultural: having more entrepreneurs, more perseverance, more ambition and the capacity to accept failure.”
In that respect, Europe is up against an ecosystem that is world-famous for its ‘hustle culture’: California, says Douetteau, has a concentration of talent that is “orders of magnitude” bigger than anywhere else in the world.
“In AI, they have literally a few hundreds of thousands of people working on the technology, launching startups and ideas,” he says.
“We’ve got good AI companies in France, something is definitely happening. But it’s 50 of us, not 100k.”
Thinking long-term
Those who are critical of European companies focusing their efforts on other markets are short-sighted, thinks Douetteau; in the long term, if European companies are successful globally, the continent will reap the benefits — whether because serial entrepreneurs and their employees are likely to create new businesses back at home, or because the example they set encourages others to get started too.
It’s still early days, and change won’t happen all at once. “An ecosystem builds itself over several decades,” says Douetteau.
At only 10 years’ old, Dataiku isn’t yet seeing any employees leave to start their own thing, he adds — but it’s one to keep an eye on.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/florian-douetteau-dataiku-interview/
