Olympe raises additional CHF 1M fundraising and appoints Patrick Nicolet to the Board of Directors
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On August 28 of 2020, the software publisher for large companies announced a financing round of 2.5 million Swiss francs with the possibility of extending it by an additional million. This goal has now been met thanks to three investors taking an equity stake in the company, one of whom is Patrick Nicolet. We interviewed CEO and Co-Founder Laurent Chatelanat to know more about the use of these new funds and his entrepreneurial path.
Lausanne-based software publisher Olympe completes its financing round with an additional CHF 1M by welcoming Patrick Nicolet, former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Capgemini, as shareholder and Chairman of its Board of Directors.
Patrick Nicolet created Swiss venture capital company Line Break Capital in January 2021. For the past seven years, he has been an Executive Member at Capgemini’s General Management Committee. During his last term, he was Chief Technology Officer.Mr. Nicolet joining the young company as Chairman of the Board of Directors is a testament to Olympe as well as to the value of its technology. Patrick Nicolet’s vast experience in information systems architecture, the development and implementation of effective and sustainable strategies, and digital transformation represent a major asset for the Vaud scale-up and its clients.
Patrick Nicolet said that: “With increasingly dense and decentralized data, it is crucial for companies to implement solutions that enable real-time and large-scale exploitation because exploitation is indeed what generates value. The technology developed and deployed by Olympe is perfectly rooted in the current technological context and promises to establish itself as a leading product on the European market.”
"We imagine a not-too-distant world where business infrastructures are so agile that they can instantly adapt to business needs. Our current customers already understand our vision for the evolution of business technology, and Patrick's presence will help convince other large companies to follow this path with our product”, concludes Antoine Forel, Olympe’s co-founder, and CFO.
Source: Olympe Press Release 21.04.2021
On the picture: Antoine Forel (left) and Laurent Chatelanat, Co-Founders of Olympe
This will allow us to finish our pivot from service-based revenues to product-based revenues. The objective now is to grow Annual Recurring Revenue for the next financing round.
You participated in Venture Leaders Technology in 2017 and were selected on the TOP 100 Swiss Startups Awards four years in a row from 2017 to 2020. How did it leverage your fundraising strategy?
It gave us international visibility with investors, these connections will be useful for the next financing rounds.
When, and what, was your inspiration to found Olympe?
While working as a consultant for large companies during the period 2005-2015, I realized how difficult it is for these companies to create IT solutions that fit the needs of the employees or the customers in a reasonable amount of time. First, as a hobby I started designing a way to replace coding, i.e. writing lines of code by creating data in a database, this allows for much quicker and flexible applications creation. And it has the potential of opening development to non-coders. Onboarding end-users in product development is key to get to a good product needs fit, and the sooner you onboard them the better it is. After some time of playing around with this concept, it started working, and seeing the disruptive potential of this approach we founded the company to bring this prototype to a commercial product.
What is your advice for the potential software/applications entrepreneurs launching companies in Switzerland today?
We are extremely proud to have been able to create a disruptive software technology out of Switzerland. We had to be creative in financing our R&D because it’s still very difficult (and for us it proved impossible) to find local investors ready to take bold bets on disrupting technology. So if you want to build it out of Switzerland you have to take one of 2 risks, either 1: financing R&D through service and taking the risk of later having to move from service-oriented business model to product-oriented business model or 2: financing R&D through early sales and taking the risk the product will never become “deep tech”
Laurent Chatelanat pitching in Silicon Valley during the Venture Leaders Technology 2017
Olympe SA: The best composition platform in the market
Olympe is a software editor scale-up based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its mission is to deliver the best composition platform in the market and ensure adoption within large enterprises. A composition p... Read more
