[Luxus Magazine] Harold Parisot (Chinese Business Club) and Jonathan Anguelov (Aircall) “We plan to end the year around 200 million euros”

Jonathan Anguelov, founder and former CEO of Aircall, the unicorn of business telephony that became a centaur, was, on April 30, a guest at the lunches of the Chinese Business Club, the first business club in France founded and directed by Harold Parisot . Cross-interview between two figures of French entrepreneurship.

Since 2012, Harold Parisot, founder and president of the Chinese Business Club, has organized around fifteen lunches per year for 130 member companies. A club which, as its name does not suggest, is now focused on the French ecosystem. Every month, this leading business club in France invites several types of guests of honor for meals, including political figures (Emmanuel Macron, Nicolas Sarkozy, Albert of Monaco, etc.), big bosses of the CAC 40 ( Total, L’Oréal, Accor, Club Med, Pernod Ricard) as well as successful French Tech entrepreneurs like Blablacar, Qonto, Backmarket, Doctolib and now Aircall.

Founded in 2014, Aircall is a business telephony company that became a unicorn seven years later, after a valuation of more than a billion euros. It has thus passed the milestone of 100 million turnover in 2022, making it one of the first centaurs of French Tech. Invited to a Chinese Business Club lunch, the founder and former director of Aircall, Jonathan Anguelov, wanted to build an international company while remaining French at heart. Today it is done since 85% of the company’s turnover is generated outside France, in particular across the Atlantic.

LUXUS PLUS: Harold Parisot, you are at the origin of this new Chinese Business Club lunch at the Intercontinental Paris Le Grand Hotel. Why did you choose Jonathan Angelov as guest of honor?

Harold Parisot : We must see the Chinese Business Club network as an accelerator of professional opportunities. The address book is extremely important to grow your business exponentially. My goal is to bring in as guests of honor entrepreneurs with magnificent success stories. Jonathan Angelov is for me the perfect example in the sense that he is “a former DDASS kid who succeeded in setting up a unicorn, a start-up which is valued at more than a billion euros. A guaranteed Wow effect. And both members and participants of the club want to be able to meet and chat with the guest of honor. As you know, at the club, it’s quite eclectic: there are senators, deputies, ambassadors, professional athletes and even comedians. And no one can remain unmoved by such great successes. I am the first admirer.

L+: Jonathan Anguelov, can you briefly introduce Aircall to us? I understand that you are not only in the cloud but also in artificial intelligence, a technology in which you were among the pioneers…

Jonathan Angelov : Our big innovation at Aircall was initially to make business telephony communicate with its information system (CRM and other customer service software). Ten years ago, this integration simply did not exist, to the point that customer service was often unable to know the telephone number of incoming calls. From the start, we wanted to simplify the entire process and create a telephone system where the only relevant question would no longer be what is your number but what is your problem? Starting on this basis allowed us to create more trust while allowing the teams to focus solely on personalizing their sales pitch. Thus, Aircall has made business calls more productive and faster while improving the overall customer experience. Because above all we wanted to simplify the daily lives of sales teams and call centers, we relied on artificial intelligence in 2019 to enable the transcription and summary of telephone calls. Today, Aircall always seeks to simplify the lives of its customers, to make them more productive and better day after day and analytical tools clearly allow teams to progress on this path.

L+: What analyzes can Aircall and its AI reveal from telephone conversations?

J.A. : Some features were carried out directly and others through integrations, that is, via other companies that integrate with us, such as Attention.tech. The idea behind this is to be able, at the end of the call, to answer questions such as “was the person attentive? Did she ask the right questions? Did I personally answer these questions correctly? What was the tone of his voice? Very superior sound quality is required in order to accurately transcribe an emotion in the tone of a voice, what the Americans call “sentiment analysis”.

L+: How did you manage to manage this sudden hypergrowth?

J.A. : When Aircall was launched, the need was clearly identified and particularly pressing: our customers understood it, had dreamed of it for years, but above all, they supported us in developing our proposition. It is this need that motivated us to take the time necessary to deliver a first-class product. Given our success, we went from zero to one million euros in turnover in less than 18 months. The following year, we were at 3 then 9 million the following year, before going to 18 then 30, then 50, then 80, then 120. Now we are at more than 150 million euros to date, and we plan to end the year around 200 million euros.

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