AlphaYoda: one year in. A look back at twelve months of learning, structuring, and vision.

One year ago, AlphaYoda was founded with the ambition of enabling financial institutions to approach ESG controversies not as adverse events to be endured, but as early warning signals capable of reshaping investment strategies, risk management frameworks, informing decision-making, and ultimately strengthening portfolio resilience.

As we mark our first year, I would like to reflect on three key takeaways:

what we have learned,

what we observe in the market,

and what we are preparing for 2026.

Building a startup: a demanding learning curve

AlphaYoda’s first months were defined by essential groundwork: developing a genuine understanding of the market. Achieving product–market fit is never a theoretical exercise; it is built through continuous confrontation with real-world needs. Over the course of three months, we conducted an in-depth market study focused on a central question: What are the concrete needs of financial institutions regarding ESG data, and more specifically, risk and controversy management?

To address this, we carried out more than sixty interviews with French, European, and North American institutions. At that stage, we did not yet have an operational version of our solution, but rather a series of designs and an ambitious roadmap comprising around thirty features planned for the months ahead.

Over the course of those three months, more than sixty institutions across Europe and North America shared their practices, frustrations, and expectations with us. The outcome was more than four hundred structured insights that reshaped our vision, clarified our value proposition, and revealed the blind spots of existing solutions.

This phase of active listening became one of the strongest foundations of our development, providing us with a clear, candid, and realistic view of the market.

Once this work was completed, a second challenge emerged: financing the development of our first product version. This was a lengthy and demanding process, but an extremely valuable one, as it forced us to structure our thinking at a much more holistic level.

Supported by outstanding experts, including Michel Onfray, the very first person to believe in our vision, Emmanuel Fauvel, Florence Roux-Christmann, and the entire team at The Pool, an excellence incubator for innovative projects in Metz, we worked simultaneously on building our legal structure, designing a coherent financial strategy, establishing governance elements, and, of course, preparing several funding applications.

For several months, we developed the V1 of our solution using our own funds, while continuing discussions with our first leads and finalising applications with public and private stakeholders.

This work has paid off. Today, AlphaYoda benefits from the support of major organisations such as Bpifrance, Réseau Initiative, and CIC Grand Est. Beyond the funding secured, this phase enabled us to approach our strategy from a cross-functional perspective, strengthen our model, and prepare for our growth with confidence.

Market insights: understanding controversies to better anticipate reputational and financial risks

Over the course of this first year, one observation has become increasingly clear: controversy analysis is far more complex than it may appear. Although the volume of available data is significant, it is deeply shaped by a series of biases, outlined in detail in the latest webinar we co-hosted with Ailancy Advisory, that influence how investors perceive and assess reputational risk.

The first is a size bias.

Large-capitalisation companies are overrepresented, both in terms of frequency and severity. Their media visibility mechanically distorts risk perception.

A second bias is sectoral.

Certain industries concentrate the majority of controversies due to the direct materiality of the risks involved and more intense media coverage (energy, defence, manufacturing, among others).

This is compounded by a geographic and linguistic bias that is often underestimated. Around 90% of available media content is in English. As a result, companies based in Europe and North America appear disproportionately in controversy datasets, to the detriment of under-documented regions.

Finally, there is a critical dynamic between strong signals (highly publicised) and weak signals (local or specialised press). The Orpea and BP cases have shown that signals often exist long before the market reacts.

These observations are even more pronounced in private markets.

Limited media coverage, low information availability, and the opacity inherent to certain structures contribute to what could be described as a “not getting caught” risk: what is not documented is not detected, and what is not detected is not factored into risk assessments.

In summary, three key insights emerge:

• the need to move from reactive to genuinely proactive risk management;

• the growing importance of private assets;

• and the recognition that many solutions, in their current value propositions, remain misaligned with data budgets under increasing pressure.

Perspectives for 2026: acceleration, new features, and technological ambition

2025 has been a year of structuring. 2026 will be a year of acceleration.

In just a few months, we have reached several key milestones for AlphaYoda. Our solution for detecting, analysing, and financially quantifying controversies is now fully operational. The next steps will focus on strengthening the modules dedicated to financial risk quantification, a strategic axis at the very core of our product vision.

We are also proud to announce that several major French and European financial institutions are now using AlphaYoda. Their official announcement will take place in early 2026. Building on this momentum, we are currently preparing our first fundraising round, which will support the acceleration of our technological, product, and commercial development. Further details will be shared in due course.

In addition, in early 2026, we will publish a landmark case study on the financial and reputational quantification of controversies, applied to a widely followed market index. This will be the first exercise of its kind ever published, and we very much look forward to sharing it.

Another topic is increasingly coming to the forefront: how institutions will consume data in the future. The integration of artificial intelligence into data consumption is becoming an ever more pressing question. Financial institutions will sooner or later face a trade-off: continue relying on SaaS platforms, APIs, and traditional interfaces, or gradually shift towards AI agents capable of handling complex natural-language queries, contextualising signals, identifying trends, and automating part of the analytical process.

At AlphaYoda, we clearly see the transformative potential of AI agents. However, we believe that their large-scale adoption will still require three to five years. This timeframe reflects the necessary period for appropriation, integration, cultural change, and the transition of existing infrastructures. Recent history reminds us that the integration of the internet into organisations followed a similar path: a revolution in principle, but a gradual one in practice.

Conclusion

This first year marks the beginning of an exciting journey. It has enabled us to learn, iterate, structure our vision, and accelerate the development of a technology that we firmly believe is transforming how institutions approach controversies, shifting from reactive to proactive risk management.

We enter 2026 with determination and enthusiasm, driven by a strong commitment to bringing greater clarity, precision, and value to a field too often marked by opacity and bias.

Thank you to everyone who supports us.

Thank you to the AlphaYoda team and its partners for making this ambition possible.