December 15, 2025
Co-founding SyncAI SA
Introduction
In 2023 I co-founded SyncAI SA with Lucas Nicollier and Christian Degouy, the CEO of Bugnard SA. Our conviction was simple: artificial intelligence would transform business, but Swiss small and medium enterprises risked being left behind if no one built tools tailored for them. SyncAI was our answer to this gap — a startup focused on creating accessible, practical AI-powered software for SMEs.
Building the Company
From the beginning, SyncAI was more than a software project — it was a startup. That meant thinking not just about code, but also about markets, users, and strategy. With no external funding, every decision was a trade-off between ambition and pragmatism.
My role combined both technical execution and entrepreneurial responsibility:
- I designed and developed the user-facing side of our products.
- I worked as a co-founder to shape the company strategy, validate assumptions, and push the team toward tangible outcomes.
Building SyncAI taught me how to:
- Define a minimum viable product under tight constraints.
- Validate ideas directly with merchants through interviews and feedback.
- Balance different co-founder perspectives while keeping alignment on vision.
- Navigate the uncertainty and pressure of an early-stage startup.
Products
During my time at SyncAI, we initiated two product lines that embodied our mission of making AI useful and affordable for SMEs:
- Athena: a SaaS platform for e-commerce price optimization, built during an intensive summer at the 42 Oléron campus.
3/1/2025
Building Athena, an ecommerce product manager & repricer
- Themis: a tool designed to help SMEs make sense of their internal data (details in the dedicated post).
3/1/2025
Launching Themis, an AI assistant for lawyers
Each product was an experiment in validating a market hypothesis. Together, they served as proof that AI could be packaged in a way that was both approachable and valuable for small businesses.
Challenges
SyncAI faced the classic challenges of an early-stage startup:
- Limited resources, requiring us to prioritize ruthlessly.
- The need to ship quickly while maintaining enough quality to be credible.
- Aligning three co-founders with different strengths, perspectives, and long-term visions.
These challenges were as much entrepreneurial as technical, and they shaped my growth as both a developer and a founder.
Reflection
Ultimately, I decided to leave SyncAI when I realized that my long-term vision no longer aligned with the rest of the team. It was a difficult choice, but also one of the most valuable lessons of the journey: shared vision is as important as execution.
Even so, SyncAI was a defining chapter for me. I co-founded a company, built real SaaS products from zero, and gained first-hand experience in entrepreneurship, product strategy, and startup dynamics. The lessons I learned at SyncAI continue to guide how I approach both technology and business today.
