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Today I am very happy to share exciting news about a new chapter for Explain.
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Ten years ago, when I started working with my cofounders Arthur Muller and Vincent Pons, we introduced a major innovation: using all geolocalized data available to predict voters’ behavior. We launched our first product: a predictive targeting software for electoral campaigns and sold it to more than 1,000 campaigns in Europe, including those of François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron.
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A few months ago, we launched Goodwill, an AI-powered software that changes the life of all companies who do business with governments. Huge industry: in most countries, government business accounts for 15% of GDP ; in France for example, we’re talking about 27 000 companies, making over 400 BN €.
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But not the sexiest industry you might think: who gets excited about building permits, public tenders for water supply and environmental regulation for energy projects? Hear me out, because a quiet revolution has occurred.
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Yesterday, the way companies did business with governments was around a good lunch and decent French wine: doing business with governments meant developing relationships with elected officials to gain access to privileged information and be well positioned in the bidding process.
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Today, public procurement, and more broadly public decision, has become much more controlled, formalized, transparent. Eating and talking don’t do the job anymore, reading and writing do. You have to find information in the millions of pages of documents published by governments, you have to read tons of texts: deliberations, municipal councils’ minutes, annual strategic plans! And do this for every local government you have in your portfolio. Your job is that of a specialist in information research.
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We did the math for a salesperson working for, say, Veolia or Suez in Gironde (538 local governments): everyday she has to go through 2,000 pages of documents. 2,000 pages! It’s as if she had to read Tolstoï’s War and Peace every morning during coffee. And let me tell you the prose is a bit drier than Russian literature. She simply can’t do it and keeps missing crucial information.
Until now.
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Our tech team led by our CTO Guillaume Barrois has developed a game-changing technology to detect, collect and analyze automatically any document published by any local government. In France, our 20,000+ bots constantly monitor and enrich a database of 35 million documents (+50K per day on average), which are then automatically enriched via an NLP pipeline to make the data talk. And help our clients win more deals!
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And before I forget: one big thank you to our amazing advisors Alexandre Lebrun, Luc Delambre and François Bouvard for their precious support and guidance in this journey.
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Stay tuned to learn more!
