The first diploma Ludovic Le Moan earned was not in software. It was a vocational certificate as a turner-miller, a man who shapes metal on a lathe.
He was born in Le Havre in November 1963 and grew up in the Mare-Rouge neighbourhood. His father was an electrician, his mother kept a shop. As a teenager he left the school system. What almost nobody connects to the Sigfox story is that a teacher then pushed him towards a classe préparatoire, and in 1988 he came out of ENSIMAG in Grenoble as an engineer.
Most connected objects, a water meter or a parking sensor, only need to whisper a few bytes a day.
He moved to Toulouse, wrote software, and ran the local agency of an IT services firm until 2000. At 38 he started Anyware Technologies, a machine-to-machine company, and sold it eight years later to Wavecom. A second venture, a mobile content service called Goojet, ended up absorbed by Scoop.it. Two tries, one exit, one soft landing.
Around 2010 he found the idea that would define him. Most connected objects, a water meter or a parking sensor, only need to whisper a few bytes a day. Why pay for a cellular plan? With engineer Christophe Fourtet he set up Sigfox near Toulouse to run a global network built only for that whisper.
Money followed. Salesforce, Intel, Samsung, NTT, SK Telecom, Total and Air Liquide backed it, and in November 2016 it was valued at about €600 million. Revenue reached €60 million in 2019.
Then the awkward part came out. In 2016 the company had talked of about seven million devices; in early 2018 it acknowledged the real number of connections was about 2.5 million. Cellular networks answered with NB-IoT and LTE-M, LoRa grew as an open rival, and Sigfox's demand for a large cut of operator revenue did not help. In late 2020 it sold its German network. Debt stood near €150 million.
In February 2021 Le Moan stepped down as CEO in favour of Jérémy Prince, amid reports of internal criticism of his management. On 26 January 2022 Sigfox entered receivership. On 21 April the Toulouse commercial court chose UnaBiz, a Singapore firm, to take it over for about €25 million, keeping 110 of 174 jobs. Its US affiliates later filed for bankruptcy as well.
A man who started on a lathe built a network that reached across continents, and a company that never turned a profit. The numbers he could count by contract and the numbers he could count by use were not the same, and the gap between them was the company's real balance sheet. Founders who measure the wrong thing can be sincere and still be wrong.