[EXTRAIT] Y Combinator, 6,5M€ en 5 jours, et une mission pour les 500 prochaines années | Max Berthelot (Lucis)

·18 min·1 clip

Max Berthelot reveals that French women live 20 years in poor health—and his startup Lucis has a plan to change that.

The episode is an interview with Max Berthelot, founder of Lucis, a preventive health platform. He opens by highlighting a critical problem: in France, women have a life expectancy of 89 but only 69 years of healthy life, leaving 20 years of poor health. Lucis aims to address this by providing tools for people to understand and act on their health data. Berthelot applied to Y Combinator in February 2025, was accepted for the spring batch, and moved to San Francisco. At 43, he was among the older founders in a batch increasingly filled with young college dropouts leveraging AI. Y Combinator, known for companies like Airbnb and DoorDash, shifted his mindset from building a 'cool' biomarker company to aiming for a billion-dollar or even hundred-billion-dollar venture. He describes the U.S. startup culture as one where ambitious claims like 'I'll kill Microsoft' are taken seriously, unlike in Europe where they might be mocked. The YC program included onboarding sessions with general partners, private meetings every two weeks with partners to discuss challenges, and cohort meetings where founders publicly committed to and reported on metrics like revenue, creating a competitive environment that pushed them to '10x' their efforts. Berthelot and his team worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week, living together in a house with five people during the three-month batch. Post-YC, they leveraged the program's network to raise €6.5 million in five days from investors like General Catalyst, with one investor committing €1.5 million after a 40-minute call. Back in Europe, this funding and YC pedigree changed how they were perceived by investors. Lucis now has about 20 employees based in Paris. Berthelot emphasizes the importance of founder-market fit, noting that his passion for preventive health—unlike his previous B2B data ventures—drives him to work tirelessly. His co-founder Baptiste is similarly motivated, having lost his father to cancer four years ago, which fuels their mission to provide tools others didn't have access to. Berthelot reflects that at 43, with prior startup experience, he avoids past pitfalls and feels a 'last chance' momentum to build something impactful. Lucis's goal is to make preventive health accessible to all Europeans, integrating it into systems like social security or insurance, effectively building a health system for the next 500 years.

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