Thibaut Gallineau presents TechVitam, a company whose mission is to facilitate the transmission from one generation to the next.

I am Thibaut Gallineau (EDHEC Master 2012). After graduation,  I’ve always worked in project management (in-house or as a freelancer) and recently decided to shift from being a project manager to sponsor as part of an entrepreneurial adventure involving my friends and my wife.

Sustainable data transmission has become a necessity for me since I had an accident that was serious enough to leave me celebrating two birthdays each year: my actual birthday of course but also each year of “survival” since! 

Tell us about TechVitam. 

It all started with the name: Technology in the service of Life! TechVitam is a business that specialises in the secure storage and transmission of personal data. 

We have developed a multi-service application that includes family cloud storage, advance healthcare directives, an introspective questionnaire and digital providence.

TechVitam is a Swiss-based company, and all of our clients’ information is hosted in data centres that are among the most secure in the world, exclusively in Switzerland. 

How did the idea come about?

Many roads lead to Rome: being fed up of so many alerts and superficial content, like most of what comes out of social media, but also looking for greater confidentiality without algorithms or advertising, and more sustainability through a robust and lasting storage and transmission service. 

We looked at the market, but ultimately what was on offer amounted to closed digital safes without any transmission or legal value (unlike our digital healthcare directives, which are legally valid throughout Europe). And so, since if you want something done right you’d better do it yourself, we got together a community of around 30 early adopters and the adventure began.

What is TechVitam’s mission?

Our mission is to secure the storage and transmission of digital data to ensure complete peace of mind and facilitate transmission from one generation to the next.

And beyond this statement, which outlines the company’s raison d’être, we chose to be a “mission-based” business, with both independence and solidarity, taking up a novel ethical position. We decided to hand 20% of our profits over to #TechForGood associations (technology serving the common good) and to limit the sum of our profits and remuneration to a percentage of our revenue, paying any surplus to our users – hardly a common feature of start-ups!

What makes this mission different to the offers currently available on the market?

Our users quickly understand that beyond the costs of keeping our service running, we offer them a richly human experience: identifying what’s most important to them, sharing it with their loved ones with complete confidentiality, obtaining peace of mind in the face of life’s unpredictability and our finite mortality, etc. Being a human is all about relationships. We build on this truth to create services that aim to facilitate and enrich these relationships, so we are far more than simply a service provider!

And to go one step further, I challenge the reader to find another digital providence scheme that includes a posthumous cancellation mandate. The specificity of Swiss law allows us to offer clients a service for the cancellation of their digital accounts after their death, which represents a huge saving of both energy and time for their loved ones, especially when you consider the exponential rise in the number of online accounts since the take-off of digitalisation! 

 Who is your target clientele?

Our early adopters include families centred around the following types of people: young parents, at-risk professionals (from freeriders to military personnel) and people whose job involves creating memories (photographers, filmmakers, etc.), but also grandparents and simply introspective people.

In short, our client base is panoramic rather than targeted!

Which market need and which target does TechVitam address?

Private family clouds/blogs, digital personal diaries, digital legacy, online healthcare directives, password managers: all these different uses correspond to market needs we address.

The latest examples, online holiday logs and time capsules, even left us surprised as to the diversity of ways our services can be used! 

Why did you choose Switzerland to host your servers?

The straight answer as it can’t be beaten! It has the right legal skills (for example in relation to the US Cloud Act) and technical skills (cybersecurity, cryptography, IT architecture, etc.), and the infrastructure there is both powerful and secure. The Swiss Confederation is also renowned for the very high quality of its digital data storage services.

Tell us about the ways you manage to work ethically and sustainably in your business sector.

In tech, particularly in Insurtech, working ethically necessarily requires significant investments, particularly when it comes to protecting data confidentiality, but also guaranteeing a high-quality user experience at the risk of turning down the regular revenue stream generated by advertising. So working ethically above all means refusing easy profit and being willing to make significant financial investments for one’s clients.

As for sustainability, it is no coincidence that I used the term sustainable transmission in response to your first question: we have always prioritised the patient and robust construction of a fortress rather than a tin can factory.

Lastly, the web contains the data of both the living and the dead: the ethical and environmental impact of this is underestimated, and sustainable transmission is also about choosing to save the essential and delete the superfluous.

What are the next challenges for TechVitam going forward?

The main challenge facing any new start up is first of all achieving economic viability: our dedicated mobile app is currently being finalised, along with translations, but our key objective is to reach more than 5000 satisfied users over the next year. The word “satisfied” is not just a marketing catchphrase, it’s a marker of credibility and adherence to our founding values, as well as time and energy saved for our support staff. Whether it’s participating in forums, writing articles, making radio appearances, meeting people in the street in Swiss and French towns and cities or forming partnerships, all forms of media publicity are welcome to get us off the ground!

We were also recently contacted by a researcher about a large-scale European partnership for a research project entitled “cyber serenity as a remedy for techno-stress”, an opportunity too good to pass up and one which will allow us to rise to the challenge of collaborating for the common good.

What do you see as the next big issues in the cloud?

Being able to take it with you everywhere you go is not an end in itself. Like the Swiss Army knife, which combines functionality and reliability, the cloud should enable us to always make the most of life, particularly when it comes to transmitting what is essential: beyond simply sharing files, it should be about creating sustainable peace of mind through the secure and lasting transmission of what really counts. Indeed, the cloud should be a universal tool that allows us to reconnect with the essential, the contemporary challenge being to guarantee true confidentiality. 

What are your current links to EDHEC.

I’ve lost count! Classmates, former professors and those still active, academic supervisors and researchers, EDHEC Alumni entrepreneur pitch sessions, and above all plenty of discussions with my former students (2021 marks my 6th year teaching on the internship module): I think I can definitively say that I am “EDHEC forever” in both my professional and personal lives.