The National Assembly chooses Wimi for the secure exchange of files.
Wimi won the tender which will allow parliamentarians to work collaboratively by guaranteeing that their data will be stored in France, therefore outside the scope of the Patriot Act.
It is a small victory for European sovereignty. In a discreet manner, the National Assembly issued a call for tenders to propose to French parliamentarians to equip themselves with a new solution to supervise file exchanges. And it was Wimi, a French start-up from the start-up studio Adventures, who won. “The National Assembly has chosen one of our solutions, which consists in sharing documents with an on and off line drive”, details Antoine Duboscq, founder of Adventures and Wimi.
Protecting Patriot Act administrations
This solution, which is currently optional for deputies and parliamentary attaches, replaces the tools used until now, such as Google Drive or Dropbox, which have become sensitive since the entry into force of the Patriot Act in the United States. This allows the American courts to seize data hosted by these companies, making them potentially vulnerable. The data stored by Wimi will be stored in France, on Scaleway servers.
For Wimi, this is not the first public tender that the startup has won. While the procedure for responding to them is not always obvious for a small structure, the start-up focuses on some of them, which it considers strategic both for itself and for national sovereignty. “Sometimes, we respond alone, but sometimes we are integrated into a consortium by bigger players than us,” explains Antoine Duboscq. This was the case, for example, with the 3D modeling platform market in Île-de-France.”
A numerical solution in preparation
But the Wimi market does not stop at public entities. The start-up offers several services integrating all the components of collaborative work, from email to file exchange through project management. For each element, Wimi is competing with giants like Google or Trello, but she thinks she has found the solution to unify all tasks by developing them on her own, assures its founder: “We are entering the third generation of collaboration platforms where the type of content, its format, is not as important as the project on which the employees work.” Microsoft has taken the same turn with its Teams tool, but Wimi wants to believe in its good star.
The Parisian gem has 50,000 organizations, with 120,000 active users, with annual growth of between 40 and 50%. Its services are used by both auto-entrepreneurs and large groups such as Total, for whom Wimi is developing a new tool to manage ultra-sensitive data, which will be encrypted from end to end.
Source: Les Echos
