Article published on “Voix d’entrepreneurs” in partnership with Le Figaro on 8 October 2026.
What turns an entrepreneurial idea into a compelling investment proposition? As AI reshapes industries, the distinction between disruptive potential and enduring value matters more than ever for founders and investors alike. In the latest episode of Voix d’Entrepreneurs with Sébastien Couasnon, tech entrepreneurs Roxane Laigle and Jean-Baptiste Kempf join Maxime Dubouloz, Director of Corporate Advisory at Lombard Odier, to explore how innovative businesses are built, what underpins their valuation and where investors see opportunity.
Creating a business and valuing one require different ways of thinking. The first begins with intuition – the conviction that you have an innovative product or the potential of a particular technology. The second requires demonstrating to a buyer that this initial impetus can translate into lasting success.
Roxane Laigle and Jean-Baptiste Kempf bring first-hand experience to the discussion. Roxane left her role as Head of Strategy and Innovation at Fnac Darty to found Lemrock, which enables consumers to buy products directly through a conversational assistant. Jean-Baptiste has founded “seven or eight” companies over the past 20 years. His most recent venture, Kyber, develops real-time remote-control technology, including robots and drones. Joining them is Maxime Dubouloz, who brings an advisory perspective to the conversation. At Lombard Odier, he guides owners of small and medium-sized businesses through key decisions, from developing a strategy and understanding their company’s value through to preparing for a sale or transfer1.
Watch Roxane Laigle, Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Maxime Dubouloz discuss how AI is reshaping entrepreneurship and company valuations :
Intuition: a powerful driving force for entrepreneurs
Roxane has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn’t want to pursue entrepreneurship for its own sake,” she says. “I needed to feel that I had something to bring to a particular sector.”
The turning point came in 2024, when she was Head of Strategy and Innovation at Fnac Darty. “I realised there was a real opportunity around agentic commerce and hyper-personalisation.” Her insight into how AI could transform the shopping experience became the starting point for Lemrock.
The main driving force is intuition: when you have something of value to bring, you know it
In practical terms, the start-up enables customers to buy products directly through a conversation with ChatGPT, Gemini or Mistral Vibe, without ever visiting the retailer’s website. The assistant has access to the retailer’s live catalogue, prices and stock levels, allowing it to guide customers towards relevant, available products. Lemrock’s ambition is to “connect the right product with the right consumer through generative AI”. The idea responds to a model Roxane believes has run its course: intrusive advertising, which is costly for businesses and often fails to reach the right audience.
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learn more Asked what drives her to create, Roxane is unequivocal: “The main driving force is intuition: when you have something of value to bring, you know it.” But intuition is often the starting point for a successful entrepreneurial journey. Turning that conviction into a viable business takes determination, the right team and the resources and financing to bring the idea to market.
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Business creators: a distinct type of entrepreneur
Jean-Baptiste Kempf is what is commonly known as a serial entrepreneur. “I’ve created lots of very different companies,” says the President of VideoLAN, the association that develops and distributes VLC, the open-source software that revolutionised video playback. His focus is on “looking for very simple, mass-market ideas built on complex technologies”. That entrepreneurial curiosity has also taken him into property, alongside Chief Technology Officer roles at Scaleway, Veepee, and Shadow.
There are three types of people: those who start projects, those who grow them and those who scale them
After years spent working alongside business leaders, Jean-Baptiste has concluded: “There are three types of people,” he says. “Those who start projects, those who grow them and those who scale them.” Each role is equally valuable. Understanding your strengths and recognising your limits helps you judge when to lead, and when to pass responsibility to someone better placed to take the business forward.
He points to Google as an example. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the search engine in 1998, its commercial potential was far from obvious. In his view, they were “creators”: they recognised an opportunity and turned an idea into a business. Eric Schmidt, who became Chief Executive in 2001, brought a different set of strengths, helping to industrialise the advertising model and scale the company’s expansion. In Jean-Baptiste’s framework, Eric belongs more to the category of those who “grow businesses” – in other words, those who know how to identify growth opportunities and seize them.
Kyber: controlling drones and robots from the cloud
For both Jean-Baptiste and Roxane, the entrepreneurial spark came from something they observed while working as employees. In 2020, Jean-Baptiste was CTO at Shadow, a French cloud-gaming company built around a single premise: instead of running a game on a player’s computer, the processing takes place on a powerful machine in a data centre and is streamed back in real time. The technical challenge is latency – the time between a player pressing a key and seeing the corresponding action on screen, typically a few hundred milliseconds.
“I started wondering whether there were other applications for this kind of hyper-responsiveness from the cloud,” he explains.
If the technology could make a remote PC work almost instantaneously, Jean-Baptiste realised the same principle could be applied to any machine operating from a distance – from drones and autonomous vehicles to warehouse robots and, potentially, surgical robots controlled by practitioners hundreds of kilometres away. His 20 years of experience developing VLC provided much of the technical foundation for what came next. After two years of development, he launched Kyber in 2025: a real-time infrastructure for controlling machines remotely from the cloud, designed particularly for robotics, autonomous vehicles, and immersive environments.
Nobody knows what agentic commerce will look like in three years, and the challenge lies less in the technology itself than in scaling it
Building on LLMs means constantly iterating
Entrepreneurship in the age of AI is changing how businesses are built and valued. For companies with AI at the core of their business, agility is no longer simply an advantage; it is a prerequisite.
“We work with LLMs, so we operate right alongside big tech. We have to iterate quickly and build our team accordingly,” explains Roxane. “Nobody knows what agentic commerce will look like in three years, and the challenge lies less in the technology itself than in scaling it.”
Yet uncertainty remains one of the biggest challenges for investors. “Investors like predictability,” says Maxime Dubouloz, Director of Corporate Advisory at Lombard Odier. “What they are buying is growth potential and a projection of revenues five or ten years into the future. But AI makes that calculation more difficult, because it can just as easily multiply a business’s potential as make it obsolete.”
A company can remain profitable while becoming harder to value if AI casts doubt on the long-term resilience of its business model. For buyers, the key question is increasingly whether that model can adapt to major technological transformations and capture the opportunities they create. Any uncertainty around that ability can reduce a company’s attractiveness, weigh on its valuation and make a potential buyer more hesitant to pursue a deal.
AI does not fundamentally change a company’s valuation, but it does change its price or its attractiveness
AI changes a company’s price more than its value
“I’m going to be slightly provocative,” says Maxime. “For me, AI does not fundamentally change a company’s valuation, but it does change its price or its attractiveness.” The distinction between the two is crucial.
A company’s intrinsic value is determined through a calculation based on quantitative factors such as cash flow, revenue and expected growth. Its price reflects what a buyer is ultimately prepared to pay, and can be shaped by a much broader set of qualitative factors. “Price, on the other hand, is an exchange value agreed between different parties and depends on qualitative factors that are more difficult to measure, such as dependence on a key person, the quality of signed contracts and data,” Maxime explains.
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AI is also reshaping the outlook for some traditional sectors; education and radiology, for example, face the prospect of significant structural change. “These companies are profitable and generate cash, but finding a buyer for them is complex. The theoretical value is there, but the price can be very different.”
The discussion between Sébastien Couasnon’s three guests highlights a delicate balance: a business may be born from intuition, but it is ultimately sold on the strength of its future trajectory. In the age of AI, Roxane Laigle describes a market that is unpredictable and constantly evolving, while Maxime Dubouloz points to the investor’s need to assess where a company could be in five or ten years’ time. These two realities coexist, and that is precisely what makes the current environment so complex to navigate. The entrepreneurs best placed to succeed will be those who can demonstrate, with the figures to back it up, how uncertainty can be turned into a credible and compelling outlook.
Discover the full conversation and hear more from the entrepreneurs shaping the future of business in the age of AI. Watch the latest Voix d’Entrepreneurs podcast on Le Figaro’s YouTube channel.
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