The two met in Dubai — Aymeric opening an office for a Paris startup on his first job, Maxime in finance. They became friends, found they had complementary skills and a shared obsession with sales, and came back to France together to launch Atawa, a startup that uberized event-equipment rental. They grew it from zero to €12 million in seven years, entirely bootstrapped — a real school of sales, operations, and resilience, Covid included.
It was also where they met the problem that would become Duodeal. Every quote went out as a PDF generated from a Google Sheet: time lost, pricing errors, and proposals that didn’t reflect the quality of what they were selling. They were pitching premium experiences with Excel spreadsheets. They looked for a tool that let a client experience a proposal, not just read a document. Nothing existed. So they built it in-house.
“Our clients kept asking us where they could get this tool. That’s when we understood we had something.”
When they sold Atawa to a European leader, the next move was obvious: take the product they’d built for themselves and turn it into one for every sales team.
