Last week H Company, the Paris-based startup building AI agents, announced cofounder and CEO Charles Kantor had been replaced by former Palantir exec Gautier Cloix.
It leaves former DeepMind scientist Laurent Sifre as the last of H’s five original cofounders still operational at the company after DeepMind alumni Karl Tuyls, Daan Wierstra and Julien Perolat left in August last year citing “operational differences”.
The departures created some uncertainty around the company, which was pitched when it launched as France’s next champion in the AI race. Just over a year ago the startup raised a $220m seed round from investors including Accel, and also had backing from and plans to form a commercial relationship with US-based robotic process automation (RPA) software company UiPath.
A week into his role at the helm Cloix tells Sifted H is moving forward relatively unaffected by the changes.
“The backbone of the company hasn’t changed,” Cloix tells Sifted. “It is Laurent Sifre who is really developing things.
“He is working brilliantly, releasing models that are performing better than US and Chinese rivals. We really have a diamond in the rough and now we have to turn that into something we can deploy in the real world.”
What’s next for H?
Since raising its seed round, H has largely remained in stealth, with investors getting few updates on the company’s development and roadmap. Questions have also been raised around the lack of clear leadership and vision for the business.
This is particularly critical in a fast-moving field that is increasingly competitive, with US-based tech giants like OpenAI and Google, as well as a number of companies in China and Europe, all doubling down on AI agents.
Earlier this month H released a series of agents, including its first commercially available agentic system. It includes models the company says perform better than its rivals at a lower price point.
Cloix says his first priority will be to bring these products into enterprises. “Our models are incredible raw material,” he says. “Now we have to deploy.”
To do so he plans to bring Palantir’s “secret sauce” to the French startup: forward deployed engineers. “Forward deployed engineers is how you start everything at Palantir,” says Cloix. “I want to bring that to H.”
Forward deployed engineers, a concept developed by Palantir, are software engineers that embed directly with customers to deploy the technology, but also adapt and iterate in real-time based on feedback from users — and help them identify new use cases they hadn’t seen.
“If we want to secure 10 of the largest French enterprises, we’re going to need people who can deploy complex AI systems but also understand what their problems are,” says Cloix. “That’s my priority.”
This is also how the company will determine its product roadmap.
“You think you have the perfect product and then — it’s what I saw at Palantir — you land in the enterprise world and there are all those constraints,” says Cloix. “Right now it’s hard to tell which product will be our star product.”
H has already deployed pilots with enterprises in sectors ranging from hospitality to finance. There aren’t any partnerships with the government yet, but Cloix says this isn’t excluded in future.
It is too early to share the names of “real customers”, says Cloix. “But this is the direction we’re heading in.”
Who is Gautier Cloix?
Cloix, who started his career as an engineer, joined US Big Data giant Palantir 10 years ago. He’d previously briefly worked for JPMorgan before going on what he describes as a “quest for meaning”, which saw him join the French Navy, teach in a high school and work in a prison.
In 2015, shortly after Cloix landed at Palantir, the French government’s security services contracted the Big Data giant following a series of deadly terrorist attacks in Paris to develop data analysis tools for counter-terrorism.
Cloix oversaw Palantir’s deployment in French government services and the company’s expansion to France, including the opening of a new office in Paris.
But after 10 years Cloix says he was looking for a new challenge. Discussions with H’s investors started several months ago, he says, although he didn’t specify why Kantor was being replaced.
He was convinced to join H after he met with Laurent Sifre, who is known for having contributed to DeepMind’s computer program AlphaGo. “I found that he was not only a superstar among researchers, but also very entrepreneurial,” says Cloix.
