Category: Corporate

Antidot announces a €5.5m funding round from Ventech and CM-CIC Innovation to accelerate its international deployment of Fluid Topics

Posted on by Valentin GUENICHON

Lyon, January 23, 2019 – Antidot, the software vendor behind Fluid Topics Dynamic Content Delivery platform, announced today that it has closed a €5.5m financing round from pan-European investment fund Ventech and its historical partner CM-CIC Innovation (a member of Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale Group).

With roots in Lyon and Lambesc (France) and field operations in Boston (US), Antidot has been developing innovative search and enrichment technologies that help companies leverage their textual content since 1999. Capitalizing on its expertise, in 2015 Antidot launched Fluid Topics, a Content Delivery Platform that revolutionizes how technical documentation and product information is published and accessed in Customer Support and Field Maintenance applications.

Antidot targets makers of sophisticated products (software vendors, industrial firms, high-tech equipment manufacturers, infrastructure operators, financial services, etc.) for whom seamless access to technical content is critical to product adoption and customer satisfaction.

This funding enables Antidot to accelerate the development of its strong technology roadmap around content delivery. Building on recent successes with major customers that include Talend (US), Teradata (US), Kone (Finland), Médiamétrie (France) and EasyMile (France), this €5.5m capital infusion also signifies an increase in Antidot’s global coverage as the firm endeavors to both strengthen its US operations and deepen its focus on Northern and Central Europe.

Fabrice Lacroix, CEO and Founder of Antidot, attests to the value of this funding, explaining: “We are pleased to receive the backing of a global investment player like Ventech, and a renewed commitment from CM-CIC Innovation who has been supporting us since the beginning of the story. This new funding will allow us to accelerate the next stages of our growth, both by expanding the functional scope of our platform, and by extending our market coverage in a context of strong internationalization.”

Karine Lignel, President of CM-CIC Innovation and member of the Board of Antidot, adds: “CM-CIC Innovation is proud to back Antidot, and to have supported the various phases of the company’s development. The recent successes of the Fluid Topics solution are extremely promising and we are excited about the next phase of growth.”

Claire Houry, General Partner at Ventech, who with this investment joins the Board of Antidot, explains: “We were impressed by Antidot’s highly experienced team and its extensive international client list. With Fluid Topics, the company leverages 20 years of expertise in Machine Learning to offer software vendors and industrial companies a solution that re-invents the user experience of Customer Support or Field Maintenance departments. We are very proud to work with them to accelerate their international development.”

About Antidot

Antidot is the vendor of a content delivery software platform (CDP) that is based on 20 years of advanced research in semantic search and content enrichment. Its flagship product, Fluid Topics, multiplies the value of technical documentation by delivering dynamic product information in a personalized and contextualized form. Antidot helps more than 150 customers around the world to improve their operational efficiency.

For more information: www.antidot.net and www.fluidtopics.com

About CM-CIC Innovation

CM-CIC Innovation is the subsidiary specializing in venture capital investments of CM-CIC Investissement (€3.0 billion in capital), a member of the Crédit Mutuel Alliance Federal Group. It invests in companies developing promising technologies. CM-CIC Innovation selects companies with strong growth potential in dynamic sectors such as information technology, telecommunications, electronics, life sciences, new materials and the environment. For more than 15 years, CM-CIC Innovation has been investing – and often reinvesting – its own capital to support innovative companies in their go to market. CM-CIC Innovation provides long-term capital support to innovative startups to increase their chances of success.

For more information: www.cmcic-investissement.com

About Ventech

Ventech, a leading European venture capital firm, invests through offices in Paris, Munich and Helsinki into high-growth companies with activities in the digital economy (Enterprise Software, Deep Technology, Marketplaces, Media). In China, Ventech manages a dedicated regional fund with a team based in Shanghai which also offers business development support in Asia for European portfolio companies.

With more than 850M€ raised since 1998, Ventech has invested in over 150 companies in Europe, China, Russia and in the US.

Current active investments in Europe include successful high growth companies such as Believe, Botify, Freespee, Launchmetrics, Ogury or Speexx.

For more information: www.ventechvc.com

Stagiaire chez Antidot

Posted on by

Chez Antidot, on ne colle pas les stagiaires à l’imprimante. Ils ont une vraie mission, un vrai environnement de travail, un vrai maitre de stage qui les encadre, les fait progresser. On en prend peu pour que la relation soit enrichissante pour tout le monde et en général cela se termine par une embauche ou, pour cette fois, une poursuite des études en alternance.

Témoignage de Florentin, étudiant en Licence Informatique à l’Université de Lyon 1, en stage 6 mois.

Continue reading “Stagiaire chez Antidot” →

Antidot Engineering practices

Posted on by

Software quality and robustness largely depend on the development methods in place. We can proudly say that Antidot applies state-of-the-art practices, with a constant effort to sharpen our methodology.

Software engineering

We apply state of the art techniques and good practices when coding. Our software is built using the continuous delivery paradigm.

  • Code is versioned in an internal Git source control system: all changes are logged and monitored
  • Our products are built using the latest versions of C++ , Java and Python (currently C++14, Java 8 and Python 3.5). We apply security patches and bug fixes to the third libraries that we use. Software is built using the continuous delivery paradigm
  • For every feature or bug fix, a topic branch is created. Jira epic/stories/tasks are created to track the development and our SCM tools (Gitlab CI and Jenkins) are linked to Jira.
  • A bug fix commit is not accepted without a test proving the issue is really fixed.
  • Code is written in pair mode and/or a merge request is created for review.
  • Code includes unit tests, functional tests and large tests involving all components.
  • These tests are run for every commit (several thousand tests).
  • Branches can be merged into a release branch only after review and if CI status is still ok.
  • Every commit on a release branch that leaves CI green (including large tests) creates an installation candidate. It usually takes about an hour for a valid commit to produce an installation candidate.
  • Each night additional tests that recreate a full day of production are run on the latest installation candidate, including stress and recovery tests.
  • Every week (or more often if required) we cherry pick the “best” candidate of the week (usually the latest) and deliver it to our customers (release note + updated package repository).

Code analysis

  • Code coverage and static analysis tools are frequently run (Sonar,CppCheck, SafeHTML …).
  • Penetration tools are frequently run.

DevOps

  • DevOps feedback loop provides quick feedback to developers about installation, upgrade or production issues.
  • Our Ops team can (and will) refuse to install a version if they are not confident with its quality.
  • Our Ops team uses state of the art monitoring and automated deployment tools (Puppet, Ansible, FAI …).  Our servers are regularly cleaned and reinstalled automatically.
  • Container technologies (LXD, Docker) are heavily used to isolate environments and to ensure that our software can be built, installed and run from a bare OS installation.
  • When preparing rollout of major update, DevOps transversal teams perform non-regression, performance and stress tests of the new binaries (“you build it, you run it”).
  • A/B techniques are used to progressively roll out new versions in our Cloud. Changes and user behavior are monitored in real time and can remove a new version from production if required without having the need to rollback software or databases.
  • Feature toggles enable progressive rollout of new features to selected customers.
  • HipChat rooms are used internally for efficient communication between Dev, Ops, internal Professional Services users, …

Agility

  • Teams work in Agile mode, using Scrum, Kanban or in-house mix of various Agile methods.
  • All teams use the same rhythm: iterations of 3 weeks, at the end of which retrospectives and review ceremonies are held.
  • Our managers and developers frequently attend Agile Tour meetings to challenge and update their skills.

Culture

  • Our developers are passionate, they attend several conferences per year (DockerCon, Fosdem, Devoxx …) and go to local meetups and JUGs.
  • Every week a developer talks in front of his peers of a specific technological topic (30 minutes).
  • Hackathons are held to foster innovation.
  • Frequent meetings are held between stakeholders (Product owner, Support and Professional Services managers, Pre-sales staff, Top management ….) to ensure that everybody is focused on providing value to our Customers.
  • Professional Services teams lead a review meeting after completion of customer’s projects. This review provides feedback to developers and ops, allow fine tuning of the backlogs. This also allow Support staff members to gain project knowledge.