Philippe Laval

As CTO and Managing Partner at Jolt Capital, I lead a team of talented developers and engineers in building Ninja, our AI-powered platform that dynamically tracks and analyzes a database of 5 million companies—enhancing dealflow, due diligence, and competitive intelligence.

A serial entrepreneur with a passion for big data search and AI-driven analytics, I previously founded and led:

• Evercontact, an automated service that keeps address books and CRMs up to date (exited in 2016).

• Sinequa, a Gartner and Forrester leader in enterprise search (exited in 2024).

I split my time between San Francisco and Paris—mostly Paris now—and in August, you’ll likely find me kite-surfing in Houat. I’m also the author of Winter is NOT Coming, a book on Game of Thrones and management lessons.

March 25, 2025

The Rise of the Product Engineer

Lately, conversations around our office at Jolt Capital feel like something straight out of a Targaryen family dinner scene from 'House of the Dragon'—intense, spirited, occasionally fiery. But instead of dragons or the Iron Throne, our debates revolve around something a little less mystical but equally transformative: how artificial i...

March 17, 2025

AI Disruption: When Scientific Peer Review and Taxi Apps Converge

It’s far from a secret that artificial intelligence is reshaping traditional processes. But what happens when AI sets its sights on one of the bedrocks of academic rigor—peer review? The evolution underway in scientific publishing draws striking parallels with an earlier moment in tech history: when ride-hailing apps like Uber upended ...

February 20, 2025

Taming the AI Dragon: Power and the Illusion of Precision

A few days ago, tech analyst Benedict Evans has published “The Deep Research Problem”, reviewing OpenAI’s “Deep Research.” On paper, this new tool seems a dream come true for anyone who spends much of their time gathering, compiling, and analyzing data. Yet Evans highlights several pitfalls that reveal the true state of Generative AI t...