A French software publisher with one specialty: automating customer relationships.

VENTUS SAS is founded in Normandy with a precise trade: publishing software that automates customer relationships. The company's first act is acquiring SMS Meeting — an SMS appointment-reminder service born in 2018, whose rights we take over. What we inherit amounts to very little: an Outlook add-in and a small API. Everything else has to be built, and that is exactly the point.

• An Outlook add-in
• A small API
• Everything else to write

Two years to turn an add-in into a complete service: a new website, a customer area able to handle resellers and their own clients, a rebuilt API, a version for the new Outlook, another for Google. SMS Meeting reaches maturity and becomes what it has remained — a product that does one thing well, asking nothing of the person using it.

Running the company, we ran into the very problem our customers face. A CRM here, an emailing tool there, a phone system, a calendar, invoicing, support: six subscriptions, six exports, no overall view. Automating the customer relationship one task at a time was no longer enough; it had to be brought together. In April we opened the project under the code name Avalanche.

Two and a half years of building. Eight business hubs on a single database, 45 microservices, and five sites around the platform: the application, the official website in 14 languages, the help centre in 16 languages, the developer portal and the status page. The work began precisely when generative AI became genuinely usable, and that changed everything: we did not bolt it on afterwards. One microservice is devoted entirely to it, another runs the agents, and both were in the plan before the first line of code. Avalanche became Metaventus.

The launch is not the end of the build, it is the start of the test: the coming months go to one thing only, holding up at scale as well as in a demo. In parallel, a second project has started under the code name Adam. More on that soon.