At the end of February, reaching the founders of AEgir is no easy task. As part of the huge Orion 26 exercise, simulating a high-intensity engagement of the French army and its allies, Mikael Volut is aboard the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier. His associate, Nicolas Bordet, is in Brest, also supporting the operations of the French Navy in one of the command centers set up for the occasion. For the start-up AEgir, co-founded by the two directors with their friends Matthieu Vanicat and Yann Volut, Orion is a baptism of fire: their command and control (C2) software, Octopus, enhanced with AI, is being deployed for the first time on this scale to assist naval operations.
“Octopus is a tool that allows the coordination of heterogeneous system actions,” explains Nicolas Bordet, the company’s CEO. “In the short term, it can be elements of the French naval group: the aircraft carrier itself, frigates, refueling ships, and the aircraft and helicopters it deploys. In the longer term, the software will be able to control swarms of aerial or underwater drones.”
The founders know what they are talking about. In 2014, two of them, Mikael Volut (ENS Paris Saclay) and Nicolas Bordet (Polytech Orléans), founded Ose Engineering, an engineering services company that was already deploying artificial intelligence solutions. The company was sold in 2020 to the giant GTT, a specialist in membranes for the transport of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
