Celebrating Female Entrepreneurship With Powata’s Sophie Normand
Sophie Normand, Co-founder of Powata
Sophie Normand, Co-founder of Powata, shares her journey as a telecom engineer, serial entrepreneur and a mother of three
Since 2011, French serial entrepreneur Sophie Normand has been relentless in her pursuit of entrepreneurship and pushing the boundary for women in tech.
Sophie co-founded Powata with Jean-Christophe Bougle in 2017. She leads the technical team as well as the operations of the company. As a Foundry and LEVEL3 startup, Powata has been working with The Unilever Foundry for the past two years and have undertaken successful insights and data gathering campaigns for: Royco, Unilever Food Solutions and Walls.
“My role in all our businesses is mostly like a COO, whereas my co-founder, Jean-Christophe Bouglé, is more on the business development side,” says Sophie. “Understanding business challenges, translating them into processes, workflows, and looking for the most suitable technology and architecture is my definition of my responsibilities.”
Entrepreneurship is a never-ending journey of learning
After a career as a telecom engineer in France, my family and I moved to Singapore in 2009 so I could attend the INSEAD MBA program. After INSEAD, I created my first company, fewStones, a video production agency in Singapore. I then met my business partner and we co-founded Veeroll, a SaaS platform to create video ads on YouTube and Facebook, and then Powata, a technology company providing mobile apps and image recognition for the physical retail operations.
Every day, with any new project, I have to keep up to date with new technologies, best practices and make the right choices to be able to provide the most cost effective solution to the challenges faced by our clients.
The right startup ecosystem and platform are the key factors for startups to grow
I was already a mother of two when I started fewStones and now a mother of three. Being both a mom and an entrepreneur can be quite challenging, but if there is a place to do it, it’s definitely Singapore. The infrastructure, government support and vibrant startup ecosystem in Singapore provide a conducive environment for entrepreneurship.
The impact of Unilever Foundry and LEVEL3 on Powata's business has been tremendous. The Foundry Team supported us and helped us scale across the region and enter markets in Europe and US. LEVEL3 as a co-working space helped us expand our network and unlock many business opportunities with Unilever and beyond.
You can’t predict the correct timing to start a business, but you have to be ready to pivot
Bill Gross once said, the two biggest factors for success are timing and team. It is not always easy to assess if the timing is right for a business. Sometimes the window can be narrow. For instance for Veeroll, we were one of the early players in the video ads market. Consequently we had to educate our customers, which took a lot of energy and resources. Thanks to our new product offerings and first mover advantage, the company did very well in the first two years. On the contrary, when Powata was founded, we were late in the market for logistics solution. After 6 months we pivoted towards what Powata is today, a suite of mobile applications for physical retail.
Prior to her entrepreneurial journey, Sophie Normand spent more than 10 years in various R&D and Operations positions for large Telecom companies in Europe. Sophie holds a master’s degree in engineering from ENST (France) and an MBA from INSEAD.