The French start-up Novo Senso was at CES 2025 to present its NovoStable solution for horse health. It takes the form of an application which analyzes the state of equines in their box from a video stream (provided by a simple camera) and alerts their owners in the event of a change in behavior.
“We are talking about notable changes, for example in cases of colic, which can cause death within 6 to 8 hours if it is not taken into account. However, this often occurs at night”comments Julien Cornouiller, CTO & co-founder of the start-up. 40,000 horses die this way each year.
4 million data per day and per horse
NovoStable is therefore an automated and intelligent video surveillance solution, which operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week using computer vision. “We collect 4 million data per day per horse”specifies the CTO. The owner is alerted differently depending on the severity of an event: notification in the application, SMS or telephone call in the event of an emergency.
This can be the case for foaling, for example, when a mare is about to give birth. The system sends a phone call 5 to 30 minutes before the foal is released. A thermal version is in R&D for detecting hot spots and taking temperatures in the eye, and other innovations are also under development.
NovoStable is intended for stud farms, veterinarians, stables and owners of competition horses. “We started with B2C, and that taught us a lot because users are very demanding, but the real market is B2B,” confides Julien Cornouiller. Novo Senso signed its first American client in Texas on January 1, and is also present in Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and of course in Europe. It is for example used by the Haras de Bouquetot, which has 9 stallions, more than 200 mares and experiences around a hundred births each year.
Fundraising planned for 2025
Novo Senso is based in Annecy and employs around ten people. It was founded 5 years ago by Julien Cornouiller, IT manager in the luxury world, and Victoria de Poumeyrol (CEO), who worked in digital but above all who owned sports horses. Like many success stories, the solution was born from a need felt by Victoria de Poumeyrol and which was not addressed.
Novo Senso achieved 200,000 euros in turnover in 2024 and is not yet profitable, but anticipates explosive growth in the next three years. “We are now scaling up with a global deployment in Asia, the Middle East and the United States”explains Julien Cornouiller.
The start-up is confident in particular because it has few competitors, the main one being the German Acaris. Especially since the horse industry is worth 400 billion dollars, not counting sports betting. Novo Senso, which has raised 1.2 million euros to date, will therefore undertake a new fundraising of 2 to 3 million dollars this year to support its growth.
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