Noon on a Thursday in September, and Gautier Cloix is standing by the edge of the Seine river with me, reminiscing about the time 10 years ago he jumped in with his friends. That was at 1am and they had been, shall we say, in fine spirits.
It’s an unusual morning for both of us. Rarely does a CEO agree to swim in a famously polluted river with a journalist they’ve never met before.
But this is only Cloix’s latest leap of faith: in June he left his New York job at Palantir, the mysterious and powerful data analytics firm, to become boss of Paris AI startup H Company, the mysterious (and maybe one day powerful) AI company.
The 41-year-old Frenchman’s return to the capital coincided with an end to the century-long ban on swimming the Seine. What better way, I thought, to reacquaint him with the city.
Except I’ve blown it: swimming is permitted only in three designated (and supervised) spots and, as I discover on the day I’m to meet Cloix, they’ve all closed for the season. This could be a damp squib.
Taking the plunge
Fortunately, Cloix has a hack. “Let’s just jump in over there,” he says, pointing to a spot beyond the official pool.
It’s unlikely the authorities will nick us for stealing a swim, as they’re busy on the other side of the river, policing a large protest. The French are being very French and angry with the government today.
We derobe (“ah, so you are an Irishman”, is how Cloix’s colleague greets my pasty skin) and lower ourselves into the snot-green water, which has a surprisingly nice temperature.
“Here’s where I was bitten by a jellyfish recently,” says Cloix, pointing to a large welt on his ribs.
Bobbing in the water, we talk about some bruising moments experienced by H, which started so boldly in 2024, raising €220m from mega-name investors — former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, French billionaire Xavier Niel and Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner among others — and, before releasing a single product, promising to achieve “AGI” (artificial general intelligence), meaning its tech would match the many powers of the human mind.
But the company hit turbulent waters, with three of the five cofounders leaving just three months after the raise (“operational differences” was the official explanation). H, which today has around 70 people, doesn’t talk about AGI anymore but it has released three workplace “AI agents”, which the company says can perform actual tasks for different industries and are cheaper than competitors’ offerings.
Did Cloix know what he was taking on? His smile acknowledges the company's topsy turvy start but he’s very familiar with the place, he assures me, having advised the company for several years.
“It's pressure” to have this calibre of investors, he says. “Every decision we need to make, every new product we launch, has to be something very ambitious. We cannot just be copying something that exists in China or the US. The objective of all our teams is to be the best in the world at what we do.”
In the deep end
Before our chat, I knew plenty about Palantir’s reputation and little about what it actually does.
I know investors love the place: when someone announces on LinkedIn that they’re leaving Palantir to start a company, it’s chum in the water for VCs who want to get in on it. People outside the tech world are more wary of Palantir because of its shadowy work with spy services and governments.
In the wake of devastating terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, the French government used Palantir’s data-gobbling skills to help augur where the next attacks could come from.
Cloix — who led this partnership in his former role as director — explains to me, a little surprisingly, that tech is the least of what makes Palantir successful; rather, it’s a fanatical focus on outputs and a requirement for employees to go to great lengths, if needed, to solve problems.
“You're in the deep end, responsible for a big chunk of the business on your own, something that I really liked. They push you. There’s no safety net. You sort of build your own company [within the company].”
Cloix wants to import some of the Palantir culture to H. “There’s a really high focus, not on having the best technology, but having the best results,” he continues. “At Airbus, you are there to make more planes, for example. And if you don't make more planes, you don't really get paid. [At H], we provide an ROI or an impact to the customer, rather than a technical solution.
“It's very important to me that everybody is really driven by the mission,” he adds. “If we need 60 AI researchers to go work on a problem at [for example] Charles de Gaulle airport tomorrow, everybody goes, and we stay, maybe until midnight — that sort of mindset.”
First, H has to beat the other AI agent-touting companies and win clients, by proving its AI is really helping productivity and not creating a new problem: "workslop". The term, coined by researchers at Harvard Business Review, describes low-quality AI-generated content — memos, reports, emails — that's wasting employees time.
Cloix notes that Europe is a less forgiving market than the US, where “companies think it's fine to spend €100k on novel tech, even if it doesn’t end up working, because the risk is not spending €100k on something that's going to completely create a competitive difference.”
Fourteen months is the average time to close a big enterprise deal in Europe, he says. “We can't afford that time, so after two months of discussions, we say; ‘Last meeting, if you want to work with us or not, okay’.”
I ask him about tech giant Meta poaching AI talent for crazy sums. Haggling with engineers over salary bumps “is happening, already,” he says, though no one has been poached so far. “They have a good salary, but the main reason they stay is they have a lot of equity.”
This is about as much business chat as the Seine has ever hosted. It's time to get out.
Making a splash
We survived the Seine without needing the pre-Olympics routine of Team GB's triathlon stars, who ate loads of yoghurt and other probiotics to combat the pollution. We also did one better than president Emmanuel Macron, who was supposed to take a dip last year to reassure everyone about the quality of the water. A trending hashtag online in response to this proposal — #JechiedanslaSeine, meaning “I'm pooping in the Seine” — perhaps made him think otherwise.
Back on land, Cloix tells me about his diverse pre-tech career. There was a year in the Navy — he looks a little wistful when he talks about a night of shore leave in Dublin — and a spell teaching maths to prisoners. At another point, Cloix explored setting up a recording studio in the Caribbean. “It didn’t work out but the travel was great.”
His style of running H promises to be more outgoing than that of his lowkey predecessor Charles Kantor, who didn’t do many interviews. It also strikes me late into our chat that Cloix reminds me — in looks, rather than personality — of Russ Hanneman, the crazy multi-billionaire from the TV show Silicon Valley.
But mostly I’m thinking of a shower. “It didn’t smell as bad as I feared,” says Cloix, who puts on his suit and heads to his next meeting.
