The News
After the recent high-profile exits of the founders of French AI startup H Company, its new CEO Gautier Cloix tried to ease concerns about its trajectory in his first public appearance since taking the helm last month.
The high-flying firm building agentic AI for businesses lost three of its co-founders over “operational differences,” after raising $220 million in a seed round last year, one of the largest in history. In June, the company replaced then-CEO Charles Kantor with Cloix. Only one of the founders, Laurent Sifre, formerly of DeepMind, remains on staff as chief technology officer.
“I’ve been in touch with the founders and investors most of the whole duration of the company,” Cloix, a former Palantir director, told Semafor’s Reed Albergotti at the RAISE Summit in Paris on Wednesday. “I was very happy in New York at Palantir and the only reason I would have left was to build something [of] similar size to Palantir. What I saw was the potential to build not only a European champion of AI, but a world leader in compute use.”
Cloix added that the founders, who left less than two years after the company was created, wanted to conduct more theoretical research.
Know More
One advantage Cloix is bringing to H is his experience with the forward-deployed engineer model — an approach popularized by Palantir that sees employees work on-site with customers and design software solutions in real time.
“It’s very hard to find the right people, the right mindset,” he said. “[It was] one of my priorities when I joined the company, and I was lucky because the culture was already very similar.”
The plan for 2025 is to serve two to three large customers, focusing specifically on their agentic integrations so H can fine-tune the model and perfect the user experience before rolling it out more widely, Cloix said. Those customers will likely be large corporate enterprises based in Europe because of H’s proximity to those businesses — and the startup has already gotten interest from some of its investors, including LVMH, Amazon, and Samsung, he said.
Still, H is looking towards the US for future expansion, in part because Cloix’s role at Palantir familiarized him with the market.