Simon Dawlat

Simon Dawlat is a French entrepreneur born in Paris in 1984. After a stay in Silicon Valley, he founded AppGratis in 2009. After Apple discontinued the application, the company turned to Batch.com, a company specialized in mobile CRM and push notifications in 2018.

In 1990, at the age of 6, his parents decided to take him and his sister on a sailboat that his father had built with his own hands. During 3 years of sailing on the high seas between the Caribbean and Latin America, Simon followed the education provided by his parents before returning to the English school in Tobago, a former British colony.

Upon his return to France in 1994, Simon and his family settled in Ile de Ré.

At the age of 15, Simon received his first PC. His parents are not Internet subscribers, so Simon has to take refuge in the island's cybercafé where he spends 3 years playing the network video game, Counter Strike.

At the age of 18, Simon raised €30,000 from his family and friends and created his first company with two partners: CSFRANCE.net, the first community of Counter Strike online players. This first entrepreneurial experience was a failure.

In 2004, Simon moved to Paris and enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern Letters at the Sorbonne.

In parallel, he worked as a freelancer for various European start-ups such as VirtuOz in Paris - a pioneering company in artificial intelligence - Kindo.com in London or 123people in Vienna for which he performs marketing and product management missions.

In 2007, Simon left for an internship in the Sillicon Valley. He stayed there for 2 years, and worked for CreativeFeed and then Sonim Technologies.

In 2008, Simon, who was already developing applications, saw Apple's App Store opening as a future opportunity. He created then a new company to develop mobile games.

Back in France in 2009, Simon launched "AppGratis", a daily newsletter dedicated to mobile applications. By the end of 2009, more than 20,000 people had subscribed and the model evolved into a medium that could now be used in various media (newsletter, mobile application, website).

In 2012, the AppGratis app that had been downloaded more than 50 million times was available in 30 countries and 12 languages. The company employed nearly 100 people of 12 different nationalities in Paris. It received a financial support of €10 million in December 2012 from Iris Capital and Orange Publicis Ventures.

In April 2013, Apple deregistered the AppGratis application from its App Store, signing a decline phase for the startup followed by a "pivot" towards a new project, Batch.com from 2014. The AppGratis service was definitively closed 4 years later, in February 2017.

In 2018 the "pivot" to Batch was successful. Within a few months, the company returned to a high level of profitability. It now distributes its technology in more than 15 countries and employs 40 people for more than 50 billion push notifications sent each year and counts among its customers nearly 1/3 of the CAC40 and thousands of major accounts and startups such as Société Générale, BNP, AXA, EDF, L'Oréal, Les Echos, Le Parisien, France 24, L'Express, Axel Springer, Chauffeur-Privé, Cityscoot or Vestiaire Collective.

Simon Dawlat is also a business angel with young Internet companies (notably in Wit.AI acquired by Facebook in 2015 or in Nabla.com) and regularly works in universities and grandes écoles on topics related to entrepreneurship and the mobile ecosystem.