Romain Moulin did not begin in robotics glory. He began as a sales engineer.
His first employer was a small French company that built automated forklifts. His job was to sell them. He later moved up to technical manager, then joined GE Healthcare, where he worked on robotic imaging machines and learned how to ship hardware. At GE he worked with Renaud Heitz, whom he had known for more than twenty years. In an interview he describes himself as someone with a strong passion for hardware, with Heitz leading the software.
They prototyped something called Exo, then the Skypod, a robot that drives on the floor and climbs racks up to 14 metres.
What pushed them was a market fact. Amazon had bought Kiva, the robot warehouse system, and kept it for itself. Every other retailer was stuck with rigid systems that took months to install. In June 2015 Moulin and Heitz launched Exotec in the Lille area to build a robot fleet for everyone else.
The early money was small. Business angels put in about €340,000 in year one. They prototyped something called Exo, then the Skypod, a robot that drives on the floor and climbs racks up to 14 metres. In December 2016, 360 Capital and Breega backed them with about €3.3 million. Cdiscount agreed to work with them on design, and the first Skypod system went into a Bordeaux warehouse in early 2017.
After that the curve bent. A €15 million round followed in 2018, €77 million in 2020, and in January 2022 Goldman Sachs Asset Management led $335 million at a $2 billion valuation, France's first industrial unicorn. A US headquarters opened in Atlanta in 2021, and Japan became a key market, with Uniqlo among clients.
Exotec says it reached $1 billion in worldwide sales by 2024, with more than 200 client sites and 1,300 staff. Revenue in 2025 was reported at €340 million. In early 2026 it opened a 25,000 square metre headquarters in Wasquehal. At one E.Leclerc site in Seclin, orders per day rose by 50% and customer wait times fell by 73%.
For founders, the quiet lesson is in the pair. A salesperson who had to explain automated forklifts to sceptical buyers, and a software architect he had trusted for two decades, built a product that customers could actually install. Know what buyers dislike about the current thing before you build the next one.