The start-up, founded by three young searchers from the Inria, arrives on the very buoyant market of content transporting network and on the one of the interactivity on the web.
The three founders-Franck Lyonnet, Laurent Gautier and martin May- are three young searchers from the Inria in Sophia Antipolis. They took part in the Rodeo plan with Christian Huitema who became later manager of the firm W3C, the world consortium of the web.
The Inria in its strategy of scattering encouraged their enterprise project in the scope of an industrial post-DP. They have begun with ActiVia networks in a premise in the Inria. The firm was created in April 2000. Others sponsors gave them money like Sofinova, I-source.(the investment fund in which the Inria is a shareholder), and a business angel : Jean-Pierre Boespflug well-known in Sophia Antipolis (he managed Shiva France and Bay networks)
An enormous potential
The three scientists reached the help of a marketing senior, Gérard Schreder and the number of employees is already 10. Franck Lyonnet, 28, is now the president, but he accepted to give the direction seat to an experimented manager because his is sure their company will grow very fast : 'The potential is enormous. We position ourselves on a market that is going to revolutionize the Internet industry, with a technology whose goal is to widely improve the services quality on the Internet, especially by reducing the time to access with connexions 5 or 10 times faster and by making the sites interactivity easier.'
The principal : scattering servers near the user, put for example at the access supplier, a more performing infrastructure is added to the existing pipes that transport the Internet. This infrastructure improves the content perception by the user. Content suppliers are very interested in the service because it allows them to have a positive point their competitors do not have.
More interactivity
'This new market have seen the enormous success of Akamai in the USA born in a research laboratory, the MIT, Franck Lyonnet explains. The start-up received a 30 billion dollar capital. ActiVia networks would like to have the same destiny and is proud of the support of the real manager of W3C, Jean-François Abramatic.
Its aims are ambitious: after its settlement in June in new premises (350m² in Space Antipolis), it hopes to reach before the end of the year the number of 25 employees, and raise more than 100 million francs.
ActiVia can also try a value added for the interactivity on the Internet, and especially in two fields : 3D on-line virtual communities and multi-gamers games. It also wants to use the multicast in virtual private networks: this protocol applied to the web pages consultation boosts the content transporting networks (it permits to optimise the data transport from a source towards a great number of users, with for example, applications in the fields of audio and television).