ai-PULSE 
**IS BACK!**

The barriers to building in AI are falling, but compute is becoming the next defining constraint. ENTER explores the technologies and companies opening the field — and how builders can access the compute, models, and platforms they need to bring their ideas to life

Enter

The AI landscape is being continually redrawn. Models, hardware, and emerging players can overturn established advantages within months. SHIFT explores the forces challenging today’s leaders — and what it takes to build and compete in a market where change is the only constant

Shift

As AI becomes critical infrastructure, autonomy is a competitive advantage. From open source to data traceability and cost-efficient architectures, CTRL explores the technologies and platforms that enable organizations to retain control over their data, costs… and future

Ctrl

Watch the 2026 opening keynote featuring our incredible lineup of speakers

“The beauty of ai-PULSE is that it not only supports Europe's AI ecosystem - it amplifies it!” - Bertrand Lemaire

Republik IT

“France, through events like ai‑PULSE and investments by players like Scaleway, is making a bold bid to become the epicenter of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe.” - Chris O’Brien

The French Tech Journal

"Scaleway aims to become a key player in artificial intelligence in Europe by offering large-scale GPU cloud infrastructure." - Thierry Derouet

It for Business

Media coverage

Raffi Krikorian is Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla, where he leads the push to make open source AI as capable and accessible as closed alternatives — so the future of AI is owned by the people who use it. He publishes Owners, Not Renters, a newsletter on open source AI. Previously he was CTO of Emerson Collective, the first CTO of the Democratic National Committee, director of Uber's self-driving car unit, and VP of Engineering at Twitter.

Andrej Zdravkovic is senior vice president of GPU Technologies and Engineering Software and chief software officer, managing the global G&E software team and driving AMD’s software development strategy and processes.  

With more than 30 years of industry experience and deep software expertise, Zdravkovic rejoined AMD in November 2015 as corporate vice president of global software development. Since then, Andrej has delivered a clear software vision that drives differentiated features and supports critical customer programs, as well as improved end-user ratings and performance of AMD Radeon software.

Prior to AMD, Zdravkovic was senior vice president at Giesecke and Devrient, leading worldwide Software Solutions from 2009 to 2015. Before Giesecke and Devrient, Zdravkovic was senior director of software for graphics and multimedia, product integration, customer engineering and customer project management at AMD, which he joined in 1998, then known as ATI.

Zdravkovic holds a,Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in electrical engineering from Belgrade University, as well as a professional engineer designation with the Professional Engineers of Ontario and Senior Member status with IEEE.

Andreas Geiger is currently the CEO of KE:SAI, a new frontier open-science lab with focus on physical AI. He is also a professor at the University of Tübingen and the Tübingen AI Center. Prior to 2018, he was a visiting professor at ETH Zürich and an independent W2 group leader at the MPI for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen. He studied at KIT, EPFL and MIT, and received his PhD degree in 2013 from KIT. His research interests are at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, NLP and robotics. He has created some of the most influential benchmarks in computer vision, including KITTI and KITTI-360. He has popularized neural coordinate-based representations for 3D vision tasks. His team also won several self-driving challenges. He has been an ELLIS founding board member and created the ELLIS PhD and PostDoc program, the largest AI/ML network in Europe. His work has been recognized with the Longuet-Higgins Prize, the Mark Everingham Prize, the IEEE PAMI Young Investigator Award, the Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize and the German Pattern Recognition Award. He received 7 best paper awards and 2 ERC grants.

Bernhard Schölkopf studies machine learning and causal inference, with fundamental contributions to causality and representation learning, applied to fields ranging from astronomy to robotics. Trained in physics and mathematics, he earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1997 and joined the Max Planck Society in 2001. 

He is a Scientific Director of the ELLIS Institute Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and an affiliated professor at ETH Zurich. He has worked towards European AI, co-founding the ELLIS Society as well as several startups. He also helped establish the Journal of Machine Learning Research, an early open-access initiative that has become the field’s flagship journal.

His research has been recognized by international awards such as the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, and the Royal Society Milner Award.

Zelda Mariet is a co-founder and the VP of Research at Bioptimus. Her expertise lies in applying principled mathematical approaches to unlock insight from noisy, high-dimensional data. Before co-founding Bioptimus, Zelda earned her PhD in Computer Science at MIT, then worked for several years at Google DeepMind. Her prior research includes theoretical investigations into ensembles of AI models, understanding sources of uncertainty in model predictions, and AI applied to drug discovery.

Leonard is a co-founder and CTO of Living Models, which builds genomic foundation models for living systems, starting with plant biology. Trained as a biochemist at the ENS and UC Berkeley, he leads the company's research and product work, with the aim of shortening the path from genome to field.

He drives the work behind BOTANIC, a family of DNA foundation models trained on hundreds of plant genomes. BOTANIC-1 spans roughly 300M to 3B parameters and surpasses previous state-of-the-art plant genomics models.

Aude was previously Deputy CEO of iliad Holding, serving in this capacity since 2020, and leading several major Group projects in France, Italy and Poland, covering areas ranging from marketing, IT systems and network operations through to subscriber services. 

Aude is in charge of the Group's artificial intelligence strategy, and in this role she managed the creation of the Paris-based independent research lab, Kyutai. She is also Chairman of Scaleway and Free Pro. In addition, Aude is a member of the Boards of Directors of Millicom and Monaco Télécom. Before joining the iliad Group, Aude was Chief of Staff for the CEO of Orange Wholesale & International Networks and held various roles within Orange’s B2B division. She also spent several months with Boston Consulting Group as a Visiting Associate.

Aude has an MSc in Management Science & Engineering from the University of Standford in the United States and graduated as an engineer from Ecole Polytechnique in France.

Damien Lucas joined Scaleway as CEO early 2023. Since then, he has continued to transform the iliad Group cloud provider into a major player in its sector, with a clear objective: to become the next hyperscaler. This includes the installation, at the end of 2023, of the largest AI computing power in the European cloud in DC5, iliad flagship datacenter. But also by opening up Scaleway to a dozen key sectors, from finance to retail to manufacturing, with a resolute focus on value creation. Lucas is convinced of the need for European leaders in the cloud sector, based on the key values of sovereignty, open sourceand sustainability.

A graduate of Centrale Supélec, Lucas is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 20 years; experience in the French Tech ecosystem. He began his career in the software sector, contributing to the creation of VLC Media Player, before co-founding Anevia, a company specializing in video streaming software solutions. As a driver of business development and guardian of product-first strategies, Lucas has led major projects, including the opening of international subsidiaries, consolidation of operations and an IPO. His leadership has been particularly noticed in defining product strategy and managing software development teams, and skilfully orchestrating the transition to the cloud ecosystem.

As Chief Operating Officer at Scaleway, Albane oversees the company’s global operations, including customer care, the supply and hardware chain across its 12 data centers in Europe, and all strategic operational projects. She drives major transformations to position Operations, Hardware, Customer Care, and Finance as key enablers of innovation and international growth.

Before joining Scaleway, Albane built her expertise at L'Oréal and LVMH, where she developed a strong sense of rigor and excellence. She is recognized as an inspiring leader, able to blend strategic vision, financial insight, and a collaborative approach.

A graduate of Kedge Business School, she leads by example and supports others as a mentor and advisor, notably through initiatives like Startup Weekend Women. At Scaleway, she also drives CSR projects aligned with the company’s commitment to responsible innovation.

Beyond the GPU: What Will Power the Next Wave of AI?

Scaling AI Through Open Infrastructure

Lars Maaløe is the Co-Founder and CTO of Corti, a pioneering AI company building infrastructure and foundation models for healthcare developers. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning from the Technical University of Denmark and serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Machine Learning at DTU, with research focused on understanding complex data sources like audio and images through deep neural networks. After building his technical expertise at companies including Apple and Issuu, Lars co-founded Corti to bring machine learning to the moment it matters most in healthcare. Today, Lars leads Corti's technical vision, building the specialized infrastructure and foundation models that power real-time clinical support across the U.S. and Europe. 

Building Architecture for Sovereign AI: Lessons from Healthcare, Life Sciences and Beyond

Powering European AI Innovation and Scale

Lucile Ritchie is Director of Product & Solutions at Entalpic, a French AI deep-tech company accelerating the discovery of next-generation materials for semiconductor manufacturing. With a background spanning business, data, and product strategy, she has spent the past eight years working at the intersection of technology and innovation in the French startup ecosystem.

At Entalpic, Lucile leads product strategy and customer programs, translating cutting-edge AI and computational chemistry into solutions for industrial R&D. She also oversees the company's positioning, marketing, and data strategy.

In her talk, Lucile will explore how advances in generative AI, machine learning, and quantum simulations are transforming materials discovery, and what it takes to bring these technologies from research to real-world industrial impact.

From Trial and Error to AI-Driven Materials Discovery

Juraj Janosik is Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at ESET. He joined ESET in 2008 as a Malware Analyst, currently leading the Automated Detection and Artificial Intelligence program responsible for applied research and incorporation of AI and ML into our products as well as backend pipelines with a high level of complexity, including data lakes, telemetry systems, and autonomous detection systems design. He was a member of several international working groups focused on botnet eradication and presented at several international private and public conferences including RSA, MWC, CARO and NATO events.

Fast, Accurate, Lightweight: Engineering AI for Threat Detection

Neil Zeghidour is the co-founder and CEO of Gradium. Neil founded Gradium after a decade of building and leading frontier generative audio teams at Meta and Google DeepMind. Being frustrated by slow and brittle voice assistants , he built the engineering teams that developed the first neural audio codecs  and introduced the first audio LLMs, such as AudioLM, at Google. He later created Kyutai to launch Moshi, the world's first real-time, full-duplex conversational AI , and Hibiki, the first simultaneous speech-to-speech translation system. Today, Gradium is focused on helping developers build natural, real-time voice agents by providing ultra-low latency streaming APIs that transition these breakthroughs from the research lab to production.

Building the Voice Operating System

Khaled Maalej is a French entrepreneur and engineer, a graduate of École Polytechnique and Télécom Paris. He built his expertise across several leading semiconductor companies, before founding DiBcom, which was later successfully acquired. Driven by a relentless focus on pushing the boundaries of chip design, he then joined forces with a team of seasoned semiconductor engineers to found Vsora, a Paris-based deep-tech company competing in the global AI semiconductor race. VSORA designs high-performance AI inference chips for next-generation AI infrastructure.

In June 2019, Philippe Notton launched SiPearl, the European fabless designer of high-performance, energy-efficient CPUs for sovereign supercomputing, artificial intelligence, data centre end defence, with the support of the European Union. Its first-generation CPU, Rhea1, will be available at the end of the year. In particular, it will equip JUPITER, Europe's most powerful supercomputer which is operated by Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany) and owned by EuroHPC JU.

Before founding SiPearl, Philippe held senior management positions at Thomson, Canal+, LSI Logic, STMicroelectronics, Atos and a successful Taiwanese start-up (MStar Semiconductor, sold to MediaTek in 2012 for $4 billion) where he was Vice-President of Marketing.

Philippe holds a engineering degree from Supélec and an Executive MBA from ESSEC and Manheim.

Vincent Molina is Co-founder of pyannoteAI, the speaker intelligence platform behind 200+ production Voice AI products, including Descript, Synthesia, and Abridge. 

With 8+ years of product leadership, Vincent has managed international product and engineering teams of 300+ people across France, Vienna, and Tel Aviv, scaling products globally. Before product, he spent 6+ years in strategy and operational consulting, giving him a sharp lens on how to turn deep research into commercial impact.

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ai-PULSE IS BACK!

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Republik IT

The French Tech Journal

It for Business