Have you been hearing about ChatGPT for weeks? A French startup is one of the first to commercialize a concrete application of the technology that is its foundation (the Large Language Models).
Explain is the new artificial intelligence startup from Guillaume Liegey, Arthur Muller and Vincent Pons. Passionate about the analysis of public sector data and technological breakthroughs, they are known to be the founders of LMP (the electoral mobilization software used in particular by François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron).
Explain revolutionizes the work of professionals in contact with the public sector, which represent 15% of global GDP. Only one year after the start of its marketing, Explain is already generating 1 million euros in ARR (annual recurring income) with 25 customers.
Today Explain Announces raising 6 million euros with ARJO (Didier le Menestrel), HOLNEST (Jean-Michel Aulas' family holding company) and its historical investors (Odyssée Venture, business angels) to accelerate its development and To become a leader in France in 2 years. Within 5 years, Explain's ambition is to see its technology used all over the world by professionals in contact with the public sector.
From infrastructures to public procurement, including real estate, Explain's generative AI offers its customers a concrete application of Large Language Models. Explain automates the most repetitive and boring tasks for professionals in contact with the public sector. Starting today, the reading of complex and difficult to access administrative documents. Starting tomorrow, the writing of responses to a call for tenders and requests for administrative authorizations.
For that, Explain's AI finds, extracts, analyzes, and synthesizes information drawn from over 50 million documents, many of which have never been indexed before, including by Google. Explain customers thus save a lot of time: they say they can process 3 times more information in 5 times less time.
Guillaume Liegey, co-founder and CEO: “After 2 years of R&D and a year of marketing, we are finally taking the floor to present Explain, which is off to a resounding start. I am grateful to our historic investors for their confidence and I look forward to starting this new phase of our development with those who have joined us. Our mission is to use the most advanced AI to facilitate work between private actors and the public sector. Ultimately, it is the quality of the services that we benefit from, as citizens, that is improved.”
Sébastien Sassolas, CEO, Odyssée Venture: “We invested very early on in this trio of founders. Over the past two years, we have been impressed by their ability to overcome difficult milestones while remaining united. With Explain, they have completely reinvented themselves, and are preparing to revolutionize a new sector. Today in France, tomorrow potentially everywhere in the world.”
Didier Le Menestrel, President, ARJO: “From our first meeting, I was impressed by the solidity of this team, their honesty, and their intellectual rigor. Before generative AI became a fashion trend, they conducted a thorough reflection on how this technology could benefit their customers, always with great ethics. I am not surprised that today they are among the first to commercialize a concrete application to Large Language Models, which will profoundly transform our world in the coming years.”
_______
About Explain (explain.fr)
“Boring Reading and Writing Is for Machines”! Explain is the AI for professionals in contact with the public sector, from infrastructures to public procurement, including real estate. explain responds to two fundamental trends: the emergence of automated reading and writing thanks to AI on the one hand, and the explosion in the quantity of public data on the other. Explain is thus among the first companies to have found a concrete application to the technology behind ChatGPT: Large Language Models.
Explain's mission is to automate, using generative AI, the most repetitive and boring tasks of professionals in contact with the public sector: reading complex administrative documents and writing files for responses to tenders or administrative authorizations. Thanks to Explain's AI, no one goes through the intricacies of dealing with the public sector from scratch.
About Guillaume Liegey, Arthur Muller and Vincent Pons
Guillaume, Arthur, and Vincent met in Boston in 2008. Passionate about the analysis of data related to the public sector, they founded LMP, election mobilization software used during more than 1500 political campaigns across Europe between 2013 and 2020, including those of François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron. Fascinated by the developments of AI and Large Language Models, they decided to focus on these technologies to put them at the service of relationships between private actors and the public sector. After two years of R&D, they launched the commercialization of Explain in 2022.
Guillaume Liegey, co-founder and CEO
A graduate of HEC and Harvard (Kennedy School of Government), Guillaume began his career in Beijing, where he was in charge of project financing for Veolia. He then joined the strategy consulting firm McKinsey in France and then in the United States, where he worked for major industrial and infrastructure groups, as well as governments. At Explain, he manages strategy, sales, finance, communication functions as well as corporate functions (legal, HR).
Arthur Muller, co-founder and Chief Product Officer
A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de la Rue d'Ulm (major of the class of 2003) and of Harvard, an associate of philosophy, Arthur began his career at McKinsey and then worked in the French administration on educational issues. At Explain, he is responsible for technological strategy and product development, in particular for the application of Large Language Models to interactions between private actors and the public sector.
Dr. Vincent Pons, co-founder and Scientific Advisor
Vincent is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure in Rue d'Ulm and has a doctorate in economics from MIT. He has been a professor at Harvard Business School since July 1, 2015. After designing all LMP targeting models, he worked as a scientific expert at Explain and helped define the R&D strategy. At the heart of the American research ecosystem, Vincent is in regular contact with internationally renowned AI researchers.
Media contact — contact@grk-ic.com
