Creating a industrial start-up straight out of university

Coriolis Composites was founded in Lyon in 2001 by three engineers who loved sailing. Two years later, the company moved to Lorient in Brittany where the environment was better suited for a start-up whose initial aim was to develop an automated technology for the manufacture of boat hulls made from composite materials. It started as a student project in 1996 and had a complicated beginning. The Lorient economic development fund was the entrepreneurs’ last hope. The engineering graduates bought their first robot arm and tested their software for two years at the end of which they signed their first contract with Airbus. The sailing world, however, chose to ignore this technology. This enabled the start-up to take off. Today, Coriolis Composites has more than one hundred employees. It has become one of the world leaders in its sector. It supplies robots to numerous aeronautical factories throughout the world, engine parts for Safran, fuselage panels for the A350 aircraft, and tails for the Bombardier CSeries in Canada. But nothing whatsoever to the sailing industry...