1) The insight was structural, not opportunistic
Real estate is the world’s biggest contributor to CO₂ emissions. That’s not a new fact. What was different about Vincent Bryant and his co-founder Emmanuel was how they saw it.
They weren’t building another consultancy or planning to push another energy audit report. They believed the data already existed (scattered across public databases, utility bills, regulatory filings) and that the right technology could turn it into decisions.
The idea didn’t come from a lab. It came from years inside companies like ENGIE’s subsidiaries and Carbone 4, watching the same problem repeat itself with no good answer in sight.
“We were both engineers. We could see how much data was available. And we couldn’t understand why nobody was using it.”
That shared frustration became the foundation.
2) They spent a year testing before jumping
Vincent and Emmanuel spent a full year exploring the idea - while still employed. They used Vincent’s auto-entrepreneurship structure to run small consulting jobs on the side and took vacation days to visit a prospect in Toulouse: a LED lighting reseller who needed to know which industrial buildings were the best targets for his product.
Deeepki crunched the public data, ran the algorithms, and delivered a ranked list. The client was happy.
On the train back, something clicked.
“I told Emmanuel: let’s go. We probably don’t have enough proof yet. But let’s do it.”
Emmanuel’s answer: “Let’s have dinner with our wives first.”
3) The dinner that made it real
Before quitting their jobs, both founders sat down with their partners for dinner. Only after walking out of that dinner did they truly commit.
It’s not a trivial ritual. Starting a company is a family decision. It changes income, weekends, mental load, and the whole fabric of daily life. Neither of them had done this before.
“We needed the sign-off from our Chief Family Officer.”
4) First priority: clients, not product
From day one, their focus wasn’t on software. It was on customers. They had a clear vision of what they wanted to build (a data platform for real estate) but wanted to build it in response to real problems, not assumptions.
First clients came through warm introductions from former employers: Carbone 4, ENGIE subsidiaries. The first fully external client was Picard, found at a real estate trade show: 1,000 stores, €20M in annual energy bills, and a need to identify which buildings to instrument first.
“We helped them identify the barycenters, the most statistically representative stores. That was our first real mission.”
5) No regulatory tailwind. No obvious ICP. Just hustle.
The EU taxonomy didn’t exist. The Décret Tertiaire hadn’t been passed. Real estate owners would say: “Energy? The tenants pay that. Not our problem.”
The companies that bought early were the ones who had already decided to care, for reputation, for tenant retention, for cost savings. Deepki’s job was to find the 5-10% of the market that had already felt the urgency.
“We weren’t selling urgency. We were finding the people who already felt it.”
Thirty clients, averaging €20-30k per year, in 18 months. Entirely self-funded.
6) Fifty apps, then a real product
The early version of Deepki wasn’t a SaaS platform. It was a constellation of mini-applications, each built for a specific client, running on R Project analytics and custom ETL pipelines. It worked, until it didn’t.
“We hit the ceiling on maintainability. And we could also see what all these use cases had in common.”
In 2016, 18 months after launch, they raised €2.5M from Demeter and High-Inov to hire a CTO and rebuild on a unified, scalable infrastructure.
7) The co-founder relationship was managed like a product
Vincent and Emmanuel brought in coaches from the very beginning, not to address a crisis, but to preempt one.
“Three quarters of companies fail within five years for financial reasons. And the same proportion fail because founders couldn’t get along. We didn’t want to fall into those traps.”
They still do it today, now extended to the full executive team.
8) What they’d do differently
Some client engagements were taken just for revenue, pulling the product too far from its core. Some partnerships didn’t deliver. They went international too early and not carefully enough.
“There were things I would have avoided. But I also think we were right to go all in.”
The takeaway
Deeepki’s story doesn’t follow the startup playbook. No viral launch. No obvious market pull. No regulatory wave pushing them forward.
What they had was a structural insight, a disciplined approach to building around real customer problems, and a co-founder relationship they treated as seriously as the product itself.
Thirty clients. One million in ARR. Self-funded. Then a raise. Then a proper SaaS. Then the regulation caught up and the market they’d been building for finally arrived in force.
“At 400 people, we’re less agile than when we were two. But we have far more impact.”
