Sylvain Forte and Pierre Rinaldi, Co-founders of Sesamm
Sylvain Forte (L) and Pierre Rinaldi (R)
Numerous opportunities
How did you launch SESAMm and what solutions do you offer?
It was while reading a research article on the use of social networks to stay ahead of the markets that Pierre had the idea for a stock market forecasting tool. Since its creation in 2014, SESAMm has specialised in alternative data and offers two flagship products: SignalReveal, an analysis engine using machine learning to create investment signals, and TextReveal, an automatic language processing platform specialising in textual data. These products meet the needs of hedge funds, private equity funds, investment banks and asset managers.
Was it important to launch your company in Luxembourg?
SESAMm was created when we were still students. We won the Pitch Your Startup competition and benefited from support from the KPMG Luxembourg incubator and the Lux Future Lab at BGL BNP Paribas. This has helped SESAMm to grow. Today, setting up a fintech in Luxembourg can open up many opportunities for development and internationalisation.
How do you see the future?
Every year, we push back the technological limits of artificial intelligence. We plan to grow from 40 to 60 employees by 2021, with the opening of offices in Tokyo this year and London thereafter. The focus is on our international business development, particularly in the United States.
Christian Gillot, Founder & Managing Director of Tetrao International SA
The digital transformation of investment funds is well under way
How would you define Tetrao?
Christian Gillot - Tetrao is an artificial intelligence fintech with twelve employees. It was founded in 2014 in Luxembourg and specialises in investment fund and company data. Every day, for more than 43,000 funds, we download the web pages and all the documentation published by around a hundred management companies, amounting to more than a million new pages. This data is read and interpreted by our AI and our operational team to answer around a hundred questions. The challenge is that each investment fund publishes information with its own visual identity and its own words, which makes automation impossible on a large scale with current techniques. This is where Tetrao's technological innovation comes in, reproducing a human's ability to adapt to changes in documents and presentation. We spent over two years developing this idea before producing our first working prototype.
In what ways has your move to Luxembourg been a plus?
C. G. - In Luxembourg, we are part of a dynamic fintech ecosystem. We have received invaluable support from the national Luxinnovation agency. And the many events organised for the world of start-ups and fintechs help to forge the right links. Luxembourg is the second largest place in the world for the investment fund industry, behind the United States. Our clients are management companies and their service companies. As this is still a market on a human scale, we can easily communicate with all the players in the market. This is a key factor in our success.
What are your future prospects?
C. G. - The digital transformation of the investment fund industry is well underway. Our goal is to cover all Luxembourg funds with our solution by 2020 and all European funds by 2021. Our vision is that Tetrao's AI will handle all the data requirements for investment fund documentation. To achieve this, we will be launching new R&D projects and doubling the size of the team in the coming months.
CONTENTS OF THE FILESuccess stories from two start-ups in Luxembourg
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