By Pierre Tran
Paris – Lysk, a European start-up company, plans to bring Lore, its AI-backed software package, to the European military market this summer, offering officers a secure means to transcribe radio calls into written reports when working out in the field, two co-founders said June 2.
The Lore program, supported by artificial intelligence, will be presented to armed forces at the Eurosatory trade show, said Henry Heinemann and Florent Ogès, two of the three company founders. The two founding partners spoke to reporters in their smart new offices in the centre of the French capital, while the third partner, Marek Majkowski, was working at the Warsaw office. Freshly made coffee was served up in mugs bearing the Lysk company name.
The software is developed to help officers deliver accurate written reports to the command chain, while working in tough operational conditions and cut off from commercial internet networks.
Ukraine is seen as a potential market, with talks under way for development of the Lore program.
The software product grew out of Ogès’s experience as an officer in the French GIGN anti-terrorist tactical unit of the Gendarmerie Nationale, when deployed to Sudan. It was a struggle to work in the field with three radios open, with one of the radio channels on a headset, with intrusive sound from background talk in the command post, wind noise, and helicopters flying.
There would be an aide working next to him, Ogès said, writing down radio updates on a whiteboard. It was hard to decide what should be written down, what left off, with the risk of errors in recording enemy coordinates. There would be seconds to decide.
“I found it highly constraining,” he said. “If only I had a permanent synthesis of what was going on over the radio.
“There is a problem of over-saturation of information, and a lack of analysis of what is said on the radio,” he said. Much of the radio information went unused, and it took time to retrieve written information in the Excel system.
“It’s almost impossible to know what is happening,” he said. “That’s where we got the idea for our program – a program which gathers all the information from the field, starting with the radio.”
The program gathers up the radio calls into a ‘data set,’ draws out information, analyses, and sends on to the right officers, he said.
The importance of accurate text transcripts of radio calls could be seen in deployments.
“If, on an overseas deployment, the French army does something like bombing a village, it has to be justified afterwards according to the rules of war,” he said.
If there is no access to radio information or a search in the meta data is needed, that could take months, he said. It would be easier if there were a transcript.
Orion exercise, Ukraine talks
The company’s product was tested for three months during the Orion exercise, a French joint and multi-domain operation with allies including British, German, and U.S. forces. The exercise ran February 8 to April 30, deploying 12,500 French personnel in air, land, naval, and space operations, working with cybersecurity and information resources. The exercise was held in northern France, and spanned scenarios from hybrid threats to high-intensity attacks.
Lysk showed pictures from the exercise of its compact electronic box, effectively the server containing the Lore program, which could be updated with a USB key.
Meanwhile, the partners are also in “active” talks with Kyiv authorities on developing a prototype product for Ukrainian forces. Such a program would be similar to the present Lore version.
The talks follow a visit to Ukraine last summer to 30 km from the front with Russia.
There is “speed of innovation” in Ukraine, with software such as Delta upgraded virtually every week, the reporters were told, with WhatsApp, Starling, and Google widely used.
The military and political leaders in Western Europe showed “tremendous willingness” to change, the reporters were told.
“The mood is to change things,” Heinemann said.
That mood for change opens doors for software for the military sector, reflecting a shift in attitude compared to the prevailing view before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, reporters were told.
The Lysk co-founders declined to estimate the value of the market for its program, other than to say the market is developing fast and will be large. The company sees Europe as the target market as a minimum, as the domestic market would not sustain business life in the long term.
The company is talking to potential German “integrators,” and has advisors in Germany, Poland, the U.K., the Baltics and other countries.
“We are condemned to being European,” a co-founder said. “We cannot afford to be nationalist.”
There are several national computer cloud networks in Europe, leading to fragmentation of the market, just as there is not just one cloud network in the U.S., the co-founder said.
In France there is Bleu from Cap Gemini and Microsoft, and there is Google and Thales in S3NS, he said. In Germany there are cloud networks such as S3NS with Thales, the Delos cloud, and a cloud from SAP partnered with Deutsche Telekom.
Each country has its joint venture clouds, offering opportunities for start-ups, the director said.
The European market is complicated, and it remains to be seen how Lysk will tackle the market in France, Germany, and Poland, where the three company founders come from.
“We have to understand this ecosystem of sovereign clouds to grow,” the co-founder said.
Sovereign cloud networks
The importance of sovereign cloud networks could be seen at the 2023 Paris airshow, when Dassault Aviation said it was making a commercial offering of a European sovereign cloud computing service with Dassault Systèmes, its partner company held by the family-owned Groupe Industriel Marcel Dassault. Dassault Aviation builds fighter jets.
The political significance of European sovereignty in cloud systems was pointed up when the European Parliament said June 3 the elected assembly will switch to the French search engine Qwant from Google, Reuters reported. That move to a new software was a bid to cut Europe’s reliance on U.S. technology, and support local suppliers.
The European Commission was announcing later that day measures on chips, cloud computing and AI as part of its “Buy and Use European” campaign, the news agency reported.
Ogès, a French national, served nine years as a Gendarmerie officer, of which four were in the élite GIGN and one year at the crisis centre at the Elysée president’s office. He was posted to Khartoum three years ago, when the GIGN and special forces evacuated French and foreign nationals from Sudan, stricken by civil war.
Ogès left the GIGN to study at INSEAD, a business school in the suburbs of the capital, where he met Heinemann.
Heinemann, a German national, had worked seven years at Cloudflare, which included the launch of a financial product, he said. Heinemann met Majkowski, the Polish co-founder and partner, at Cloudflare.
Majkowski, who worked 12 years at Cloudflare, is a cybersecurity specialist. He went to Poland’s border with Ukraine to welcome Ukrainian refugees when Russia invaded the neighbouring country. Later, he helped send four-wheel drive vehicles to Ukraine to help Ukrainians.
Lysk is “fine tuning” the Whisper AI transcription service, which it preferred to the speech-to-text product Voxtral from Mistral, a co-founder said. There is constant change, and the company could switch to Mistral if Mistral came up with a better product.
The Lore program could later be sold to the security market, reporters were told.
Lysk is based in Paris, and last year raised funds from backers including Project 8 and Scaleway. The company employs 13 staff, and carried job ads for two software engineers on its website at the time of the press briefing.
The company name comes from one of the mountains in the Alps, on the Italian-Swiss border, pointing up its European origins. The average age of the three founding partners is 32, and they use English as the working language in the Paris office.
The Eurosatory trade show for land and air-land weapons runs June 15-19. The Lore program, which works in different languages, will be demonstrated in French, English, German, and Polish at the show.