Accompagnement Projets 5 minutes

My year at the studio by Arrandi

Immerse yourself in the story of a year of entrepreneurial exploration in ISS program, through alumni testimonies. Whether they created an innovative business at the end or not, everyone experienced an engaged, enriching and personal year. Listen to them and discover through the videos and interviews, their challenges, highlights and major learnings; without forgetting the power of the meetings that make the history of startups.

Pierre Sery: “ISS is quite a unique structure for a project owner”.

In addition to the salaried position that enables them to develop their project more serenely over the course of a year, entrepreneurs supported by Inria Startup Studio also benefit from a daily framework, resources and advice, provided both by the teams and by other project leaders. A cocktail from which Pierre Sery, founder of Arrandi, benefited.

The research world

Pierre Sery is no stranger to the world of research, having spent almost 20 years helping researchers and entrepreneurs to find funding and public/private partnerships. This experience led him to develop Arrandi. This platform enables R&D laboratories and companies to find and respond more easily to calls for projects, all thanks to artificial intelligence and its capacity to process and understand natural language.

While it is easy to get lost in the mass of calls for projects launched each year by a multitude of players, both regionally and internationally, Arrandi will make it easier to identify those most likely to be of interest to its users, and will help them to put together a dossier to respond to them. “By automating part of the search and guiding the compilation of the application, we can halve the time a company spends looking for funding”, says Pierre Sery, who left the Inria Startup Studio in Nancy in April 2023, before officially creating Arrandi in October of the same year with data scientist Alexis Frisson.

An environment conducive to project development

Despite his experience, he has found the Startup Studio to be a working environment that can help him develop his project on a daily basis. “ISS is a fairly unique structure for a project owner. For me, the advantage was having ‘sparring partners’ to talk to at local level, while benefiting from Inria’s national network. And, of course, to be able to talk on a daily basis with researchers and project leaders who were facing the same problems that we want to solve with Arrandi.

That’s the whole point of ISS, which is housed within the Inria research centre at the Université de Lorraine. As well as providing easy access to researchers, it also offers us a welcoming space where it’s pleasant to meet up and work, if only because of the canteen! To find an incubator within a university space is rare when you consider the value of each square metre!”

A stable foundation for freedom to innovate

It’s a hybrid framework that brings two worlds together. Pierre Sery admits that he continues to talk to many of the researchers and entrepreneurs he meets through the Startup Studio: “Many researchers don’t understand the point of leaving research for entrepreneurship, and think that start-up founders are simply looking to raise money. However, what they both have in common is a desire to solve problems! Start-up creators simply want to do it in a more flexible framework”, says the founder of Arrandi, who has found this agility and freedom at ISS. “It’s a structure that gives project leaders a lot of freedom. We have access to a lot of things, but nothing is compulsory and we make all the decisions.”

Support and exchange: the keys to overcoming the challenges of entrepreneurship

This freedom can be unsettling when it comes to developing a project step by step. Fortunately, every decision is informed by the resources made available by the Startup Studio: “There are many opportunities to meet and discuss our different projects, such as the weekly video meetings with the other project leaders, as well as opportunities to make contact with other entrepreneurs who have been through ISS. It’s very interesting for those who want to familiarise themselves with the specifics of setting up and running a business. Once again, my case is slightly different, as I’ve been running a limited company specialising in manga publishing alongside Arrandi for 13 years. So I’d already had the opportunity to make all the mistakes associated with entrepreneurship! But managing an SAS whose business model is based on a SaaS platform is another thing altogether…”

Financing and training project leaders

Entrepreneurs with no previous experience can take advantage of Inria’s partnership with institutions such as EM Lyon, which offers fast-track entrepreneurial training. “Apart from Pôle Emploi, only Inria can offer such financial support to project leaders! The Startup Studio took this thorn out of our side for a year, enabling us to develop a marketable product as soon as the support ended.

We should also mention the regular reviews we have with the ISS team, which force us to take our heads off the accelerator and step back to look at the work we’ve done, the objectives we’re pursuing and the resources we’ve put in place to achieve them. This also helps us to set milestones so that we can manage our time more effectively.”

Discover Pierre Sery’s video !