Milie's entrepreneurial experience as a graduate and founder of Lili.ai
Milie Taing is a 2011 MSc in Management – Grande Ecole graduate who recently chose entrepreneurship. With her startup Lili. ai, she has already been able to seduce the biggest hexagonal groups. The goal of the startup is to optimize with artificial intelligence the biggest projects (>10M euros) of large companies.
Can you tell us a bit more about your startup Lili.ai ?
Lili is a startup founded in 2015, specialized in project management using artificial intelligence (AI). We work with major groups on projects of over €10 million. Today, companies lose a phenomenal amount of information when they document their project. Our mission is to help them, thanks to AI, to make sense of the information exchanged, to identify thinking patterns or to reuse knowledge from previous projects, etc. In a certain way, Lili gulps down thousands of pieces of data that are all over the place before spitting back out structured information.
How did Lili come to be?
I was working for a company in Vancouver, and in the job I was doing I saw that the company was running really late in wrapping up certain projects and that we had to innovate to bring all of the information together. I presented my idea at a contest the vice president of the company attended. He congratulated me and, more importantly, helped me get a leg on the ladder. As things were not looking so bright at the company, he told me “Here’s a little gift: I’m laying you off and I’ll give you a check out of my pocket to help you get started.”
Next, I had some extremely positive meetings. At Airbus, I pitched Lili and was very soon after offered a loan. At the Ministry of the Economy, I met Areva’s director of innovation, who very quickly signed a letter of intent for a workstation project.
What impact has emlyon business school had on your career?
It’s been huge! Of course, I learned about entrepreneurship at the school, but I also gained self-confidence. I understood that nothing bad could happen to me in my career, because I would always bounce back.
What is your most special memory of emlyon business school?
One day, a professor advised me to go “to the brink” so I could test my limits. I’ve travelled a lot, and I often changed cities and jobs before founding Lili. In addition to wanderlust, this has also brought me a sort of detachment.
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