Yann Lechelle
Over the past three decades, from Paris to Los Angeles, via Cambridge, UK, and New York, and back again, he has leveraged software to unlock business potential across a wide range of fields: financial markets through real-time trading platforms; cartoon animation through centralized asset management tools; yield management through behavioral analytics and social networks; digital art in new media; mobile app discovery through recommendation engines; mobile app monetization through innovative ad formats; and applied AI to deploy state-of-the-art voice recognition on the edge.
More recently, over the past three years, he developed Scaleway, a below-the-radar cloud company, into a credible regional alternative to the three major hyperscalers. During that time, he grew the team threefold to 600 employees while leading complex change management.
He is now the co-founding Executive President and Chairman of Probabl, the scikit-learn company on a mission.
As an entrepreneur, he has founded, co-founded, or joined a number of startups, developing products that have reached hundreds of millions of end users globally, often through elegant user interface design and innovative user experiences. As a key shareholder, he has also contributed to the growth and exit of several companies.
As an advisor, board member, and angel investor, he now tracks the progress of many more forward-looking ventures.
In Paris, he is a strong advocate for the tech ecosystem: a co-founding member of France Digitale and HUB AI Paris, as well as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD Business School.
Session
Open source powers the world's digital infrastructure — from AI research to enterprise data pipelines. But how do you build a sustainable business on it? This panel brings together three figures from the heart of the global open source ecosystem: Yann Lechelle (Probabl), who made the deliberate switch from infrastructure CEO to open source; Sylvain Corlay (QuantStack), whose consulting business is built from and around the core of the Jupyter ecosystem and its maintainers; and Ines Montani (Explosion / spaCy), one of the most influential voices in NLP tooling. Three founders. Three paths. Real answers on what it takes to build — or switch to building — a business in open source.