Why Evotis: the backstory
by CEO Louis Choquel

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The story that led me to launch Evotis is deeply tied to the story of my life as a techie serial entrepreneur, and the History of digital tech. My passion is to explore and build on new platforms and it started in the eighties.

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The Personal Computer

My fascination with technology took root as a teenager when I started building software for the Macintosh. This early passion led me to become an IT engineer and graduate from Ecole Centrale Paris (now CentraleSupélec). My first job, at Ubisoft, was to develop a game for the up-and-coming next-generation console, Sega’s Dreamcast.

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The Internet

The advent of broadband Internet triggered my entrepreneurial instincts and I embarked on a new journey as co-founder and CEO of zSlide, an incubator for innovation that birthed numerous ventures. At a time when iPods ruled the digital entertainment landscape, we pioneered, with Orange, the distribution of digital music and video on feature phones and portable video devices. For Sony Computer Entertainment, we demonstrated the possibility of video chatting on TV and we developed a video-editing tool that was fully operated with a game controller. In partnership with Atari, we developed a peer-to-peer video distribution platform based on BitTorrent and we built an appstore from the ground up to distribute games for the PlayStation Portable, at a time when iPhones were unheard of.

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Social Networks & the rise of Free-to-Play

When Facebook opened their API, what a rush! With my team at zSlide, we set out to explore this new wild frontier, first with “I Kick You”, arguably the first or second Flash game to actually leverage Facebook’s social features.

As Facebook matured as a platform, the F2P business model (free games with in-app purchases) started to rise and our team jumped on this bandwagon with a new venture, ooblada. We launched the world-wide hit “Treasure Madness” which topped at 1M daily active users. The early days of social gaming and F2P were total chaos with amazing new paradigms like the social graph and unhindered viral loops and the communities were insanely active. Casual Gaming became a thing and suddenly, everyone was a gamer, including mums and grandmas.

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Mobile

At last, Free-to-Play became possible on mobile, thanks to in-app purchases support on iOS and Android. That’s when ooblada became a mobile gaming publisher and soon a mobile-first company. When the dust settled, we realized we had participated in building a new branch of gaming which would overshadow all the other branches. And the gaming sector had a new way of doing things with live ops and data-driven design, thanks to our new toys: big data, data analytics, data engineering, A/B testing, social ads… it was also a new world of acronyms: LTV, CPI, CAC, ROAS.

In the early 2020’s, Europe and Apple turned the screw on user privacy. It made a lot of sense of course, but incidentally, it knocked the wind out of our most efficient tools for user acquisition, monetization and optimization. Margins plummeted and it became harder and harder for independent studios to launch a profitable game on mobile. After 14 published games, it was time to move on.

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The New AI Frontier

Tech never sleeps. Through the past few decades, AI has progressed a lot and specialized narrow AI has been put to work in tons of different cases. But there always was a frustration: it didn’t really look intelligent.

 

Now AI has started to look intelligent, thanks to the advent of Generative AI and all its buzzwords: transformers, LLMs, image generators, machine Vision, diffusion, multi-modality…

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I started playing with OpenAI’s GPT-3 models back in 2021 and immediately saw the potential. Prototyping with this new tech felt crazier than anything I'd felt for decades. Then the arrival of ChatGPT was not just a mainstream success: most importantly, the reliability of the GPT 3.5 model and its usefulness was a giant leap, felt by anyone who was building with the API. All of a sudden, it had started to listen to you and behave and to (mostly) what you expected. You could start using it to build stuff, I mean stuff that works. That’s when I decided to start a new company focused on GenAI.

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The world of tech was still hung over from the ChatGPT breakthrough when we started reading rumors about the upcoming new model, GPT-4. People had wild expectations. Some claims were borderline ridiculous. But then it happened: OpenAI delivered and totally matched the expectations! And we knew it was only the beginning…

 

I started wondering what sector would see the most change and yield the most interesting projects. Where could GenAI bring the most value? Where could I, myself, bring the most value?

My answer: any company, all companies. All companies that employ knowledge workers of course, especially when they are well paid workers…

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There are so many AI projects to deploy in companies. Of course, that’s where intellectual skills matter and that’s where improvement yields value, whether by increasing quality or productivity or simply by bringing more happiness and quality of life to employees.

 

That’s why I co-founded Evotis, an AI startup focused on helping companies transform through Frontier AI.

 

The journey ahead promises to be a crazy ride with double-exponential growth driven by the explosion of compute and data. AI is now the focus of thousands or the brightest talents, at OpenAI, Google Deeping, Meta AI, Mistral and many other companies. Investors are throwing millions and billions of dollars like buckets of gasoline over this bonfire of innovation. Everything is aligned to provoke an explosion of progress.

 

The time has come, so let's get to it. Let's build this new world of AI solutions, progress, efficiency and happiness.

Come explore the new AI Frontier with us!