François Cazor is the Co-Founder & CEO of the fast-growing technology company Kpler. François shares his inspiring tech startup story, which began after a chance meeting in New York in 2009. At the height of the financial crisis, they noticed that financial organizations began to jump into CO2 trading. Realizing that there was little transparency to this, in 2009, Cazor and Maynier set about building the first real-time intelligence platform for this market, eCO2Market. Despite being a successful, expanding company, almost overnight, the rules on CO2 trading changed due to the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol beginning in 2012 - eCO2Market was effectively finished. To keep the company alive in some form, Cazor and Maynier consulted and also paid interns with their household savings while searching for another idea. Kpler became an instant success. Much like the CO2 market, until Kpler, there had been little to no transparency of the commodity market. Within the first quarter of its foundation in 2014, the company was already cashflow positive. Like flight radar, the Kpler terminal tells you precisely what’s going on in commodity markets in real-time. This helps commodity professionals (traders, analysts, charterers, etc.) better understand the market and make well-informed business decisions, maximizing business opportunities while reducing risk. Using advanced technology (AI, machine learning, satellite imagery interpretation), the platform has the ability to crunch over 10 million data points from over 500+ different sources each day to provide real-time, global intelligence about the physical flows of crude oil, refined products, LNG, dry bulk, and more (25+ commodities in total). By refining such volumes of raw data into real-time information, Kpler has disrupted intelligence in traditionally opaque commodity markets - thanks to Kpler these markets are much more transparent today. It works with over 600+ companies and has over 5,500+ users for the Kpler terminal and in H1 of 2020, the company went over $30 million+ in bookings.