Pierre Rinaldi, gap year MGE

“I am living an extraordinary entrepreneurial adventure”

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I have an atypical and tailor-made background: BEP, Bac pro, first computer at 18, then 3 years in the first HEC preparatory class in France for professional bachelors, before entering ESC Dijon and following the “Finance” course there. So basically, nothing meant for me to be at the origin of SESAMM, a large-scale entrepreneurial project launched two years ago.

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Its principle? Automatic text analysis tools to extract relevant information and make forecasts. We have thus created a financial indicator developed from social networks and offering forecasts 3 days in advance.

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Our innovative algorithms are incredibly effective. We obtain a very high degree of correlation between forecasts and real data, which allowed us to achieve a performance of greater than 31% in 11 months compared to less than 10% for the market.

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SESAMM consists of two engineers and myself. During the launch phase, we spent a year in the ESC Dijon incubator and participated in a dozen entrepreneurship competitions. We won half of them and as a result of one of them we were incubated at SEMIA Strasbourg.

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Today, we are at a key level in the business, since we are in the process of raising funds up to €500K that will allow us to continue our development. We also have the ambition to recruit complementary profiles who will make it possible to reach this new milestone.

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An obstacle course in an unforgiving world

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Our results have already attracted the attention of an investment fund based in the City of London, with which we have been working since January. We are currently developing new indicators and diversifying our extraction sources.

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Recently, we were approached by a digital news agency to collaborate on new developments. Our skills in the fields of Big Data, Algorithms and Statistics allow us to tailor products for our customers.

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Today, we are facing a very particular environment, that of money and speculation. It is a world apart, with its codes and its ruthless side. Not to mention that in recent years, he has been particularly maligned and has received “bad press”...

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It must be recognized that our adventure is a real obstacle course. It is certainly that of an entrepreneur, but the specificity is that there is thus a real amplitude between the funds raised and the sacrifices made. What keeps me going? Definitely, our project, which is really exceptional, and its construction, its development, which is done independently.

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Right now I am in a gap year. I did 6 months of internship and 2 months of temporary work in a bank in a trading room, which allowed me to gain experience but also to save to meet my needs. The future? First, next year, I will be at HEC Liège, a partner school of ESC Dijon, to follow an “Entrepreneurship” course. As for SESAMM, I intend to do my end-of-study internship and work there. The rest is yet to be written.

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Pierre Rinaldi, Gap Year MGE