At twenty, Florian Douetteau made the kind of choice French parents fear. He was on the path to the École Normale Supérieure, the temple of French mathematics, and a speaker biography he later supplied to a conference says he walked away from the maths courses to work at a small search company that would become Exalead. He had been born and raised in Paris, the son of a system that sorts its brightest children early. He chose the noisy world of a startup instead.
Exalead taught him two things. The first was how to build software that digs through enormous piles of data. The second was how to live inside a company that is always slightly short of money. He rose to run research and development there. Along the way he met Clément Stenac, a developer who had worked on VLC and Debian, two of the open-source projects that quietly run half the internet.
They joined the Agoranov incubator and then did something unfashionable.
Then came a detour. Douetteau left to become technical chief at IsCool Entertainment, a games company, where data meant players, clicks and money. What nobody outside the industry noticed was how much that job showed him. Companies were drowning in data and almost none of them had the people to use it.
In 2013 he and three partners, Stenac, Marc Batty and Thomas Cabrol, started Dataiku in Paris. They joined the Agoranov incubator and then did something unfashionable. For about two years they grew on their own revenue, with no outside money. The first product, Data Science Studio, appeared in February 2014.
The idea was plain. A bank, an airline or a maker of washing machines would have analysts who knew the business, engineers who could write code, and managers who signed the cheques. Dataiku gave them a single place to build and run models together. That turned a research toy into something a large company could buy.
Money followed, and it followed from America. About €3 million came from French funds in 2015. Then FirstMark led a $14 million round in 2016, Iconiq led $101 million in 2018, and Google's investment arm CapitalG made Dataiku a unicorn in 2019. By 2021 the company had more than 1,200 staff and a $4.6 billion valuation. The centre of gravity moved to New York.
The price came later. In December 2022, markets turned and Dataiku raised $200 million at $3.7 billion, a lower figure than a year earlier. In 2023 Douetteau said publicly that he was weighing an IPO. He still describes the firm as one that serves more than 500 large companies.
The lesson is in the order of events. Douetteau did not start with a big idea. He started at twenty with a hard job at a small company, spent two decades learning where data goes to die, and only then built the thing. Leaving the prestigious path early gave him the long apprenticeship that made the company possible.