Yacine Achiakh, co-founder and CEO of Wisear, and Alain Sirois, CTO. © Maxence Fabrion/Digitals
For many start-ups, a successful CES is synonymous with a well-filled order book and contacts made with investors to ensure the company’s financial sustainability. But going to Las Vegas represents a significant cost between plane tickets, accommodation or even the hotel. Therefore, exhibitors must weigh the pros and cons before attending the biggest tech show in the world.
Within French Tech, more than 200 start-ups have decided to take the plunge for this 2023 edition. Supported by Business France, the young tricolor Wisear is one of them. The company is developing a neural interface to allow users to control their electronic devices through thought. In a market for brain-computer interfaces occupied in particular by Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company, Wisear has a lot to do. Digital spoke with Yacine Achiakh, co-founder and CEO of Wisear, to find out about his expectations around CES.
YACINE ACHIAKH – The CES allows us to have the opinion of the public and the opinion of journalists on what we are doing to know if we are going in the right direction. The objective is to have visibility and feedback, so as to leave Las Vegas with interesting information about the product we are developing.
What is also significant compared to other fairs is that there are executives from all the big companies you can imagine. And in this context, the advice to give to everyone is that you have to have a follow-up to the CES to meet people in high places. This makes it possible to have meetings that are a little more qualitative. Because on the stand, there is a colossal flow with 200 to 300 people passing by every day. Therefore, there is little time to speak with companies.
The advantage when you have the following is that you can sit down, do your demonstrations, talk business… In addition, there are people who don’t want to show themselves too much at the show, such as the leaders of Meta or from Microsoft. They don’t want to be on the stand because they know everyone is going to jump on them. The ultimate goal is to ensure that our headphones are compatible with the entire virtual and augmented reality ecosystem. And for that, we need to discuss with all the big companies that make this type of product, like Meta, Microsoft and Apple.
This will depend on the types of companies. On our side, there is a lot of R&D that is necessary before we can generate the first euro of profit. My problem is more to know how I will raise funds for the next three years than to see if the CES will make a hole of several weeks in my budget, which I will not be able to compensate for. For us, this is a cost that is completely relevant in relation to the added value that can be drawn from it.
When it comes to a company that does not necessarily have a lot of cash for the next few months, it can be a delicate cost that will have to be profitable very quickly if it goes to Las Vegas. On our side, we don’t have this problem since we are only losing money and we are not generating income yet. But the challenge is to find the right contacts that will allow us in one or two years to have good commercial relations to generate much more income than what the CES will have cost me. But whether we spend 10, 20 or 30,000 € on the CES, that’s not what will impact our survival. We still have the advantage of being comfortable until May 2024, so we will surely start raising again this year to expand our team and increase our investment in R&D.
From the moment we start to have exhausted everything that is developed on the mobile part and we have really gone around everything that is SaaS or B2B, we realize that what generates the real big tomorrow’s companies are breakthrough innovations, that is to say things that will have an impact on humanity and that will create giants like Meta, Google, Tesla or SpaceX tomorrow. But these technologies require a lot of R&D investment before reaching maturity, which is not necessarily the ideology we usually have in Europe.
On our continent, we like products that have a rapid development business, where there is no need to invest too much. This approach has borne fruit since we have succeeded in creating giants like PayFit, Spendesk or Doctolib, but this is not what creates breakthrough innovations. Now, we are coming to a pivotal moment, where we can see that the existing platforms are maturing. Now the question is who will appear next. Tomorrow, if we want Europe to be the spearhead of new platforms, we must invest in companies that mobilize large resources in R&D.