Inside Pilea: A Conversation with Founders Baptiste Vanpoperinghe and Amaury Grange

Baptiste Vanpoperinghe and Amaury Grange first joined the SCET community in the fall of 2024  after participating in the Entrepreneurship, Technology & Startup Management Program. Fast forward to today, they are the founders of Pilea, a platform using AI to detect and fix subtle UX and design flaws on e-commerce websites, helping brands boost conversions and deliver seamless, human-centered online experiences. They raised a $300K pre-seed round, exceeding their expectations. 

We connected with co-founders Baptiste and Vanpoperinghe and Amaury Grange to learn about their entrepreneurial journeys and what’s next for Pilea.

Journeys Converge at UC Berkeley

Baptiste and Amaury earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from SKEMA Business School, where they studied Economics and Management. It was during their second year of the Master’s program that they were visiting students at SCET. 

Both co-founders’ journeys followed different paths before converging at UC Berkeley, where they worked together to lay the groundwork for Pilea. Amaury Grange, the COO of the company, describes himself as a lifelong entrepreneur. Most recently, before attending UC Berkeley, he was developing a marketplace for rare and collectible items, a pursuit that led him to travel across Europe, the United States, and Canada. 

On the other hand, CEO Baptiste Vanpoperinghe first built a strong foundation in consulting through an internship during his gap year. At the same time, he established his own consulting agency to help European e-commerce businesses identify bugs on their websites, a role he dedicated himself to until joining UC Berkeley in the fall of 2024. 

At the Entrepreneurship, Technology & Startup Management Program, their idea began to take flight. For Baptiste and Amaury, attending the program was an “opportunity of a lifetime,” a chance to dive into the unique entrepreneurial ecosystem that UC Berkeley and the greater Silicon Valley region have to offer. 

The Origins of Pilea

It was through his experience freelance consulting for e-commerce businesses that Baptiste first identified a need. He was hiring people to spend hours meticulously examining e-commerce websites for imperfections that no tool can detect, a job deeply rooted in understanding emotions and users’ frustrations at the expense of time. Baptiste realized that he could harness AI to automate the time-intensive task of searching for bugs.

In the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET) Berkeley course, ENGIN 183/283-003 – Startup Catalyst: Let’s Speed Up Your Startup | A Berkeley Frontier Fund Class, taught by veteran entrepreneur and instructor, Mark Searle, Baptiste learned the “art of the pivot.” 

“I want to create a SaaS scalable product that can become a huge company. The solution was using AI to automate all the hours spent by humans using a cutting-edge model able to detect the same flaws that UX experts can detect.”

Scaling Success

Together, Baptiste and Amaury began to devise a solution in SCET’s ENGIN 183E – Technology Entrepreneurship, taught by Naeem Zafar, who was instrumental in offering advice on fundraising strategy. After developing the concept behind Pilea, they needed to understand the potential customer. 

Baptiste said, “We talked to so many different types of potential customers, and after a lot of conversation, we were able to identify our ideal customer profile. A huge milestone is validating the fact that what you’re building is something that is wanted.”

“You might have the right targets, but maybe what you’re building is not exactly what they need. And so you iterate, you discuss, and you build.”

In reflecting on their success throughout the program, Baptiste emphasized the art of pitching. He said, “I really do believe that having a great idea is not enough. If you want to make a successful business, you need to know how to sell, and how to sell it great.”

The Technology Behind Pilea

Pilea is revolutionizing e-commerce UX with AI. Built on a proprietary multi-agent engine, Pilea delivers smart, real-time insights that boost conversions by identifying subtle UX flaws that traditional tools overlook. Trained on thousands of high-performing e-commerce patterns, the system analyzed entire websites—not just individual pages—quantifying the business impact of design issues and recommending high-ROI fixes. 

Pilea combines semantic understanding, UX expertise, and business context to deliver actionable, conversion-focused insights that help teams optimize just like top-tier enterprise UX labs, without the overhead. A particularly validating moment for the team was getting their first paying customer and first letters of intent—commercial traction that is critical for raising investor money. Their work in the course culminated in a final pitch to investors in December 2024, resulting in an introduction to Plug and Play, who most recently invested in the company.

Reflections on the Journey

From conceptualizing Pilea to raising their most recent round of funding, the journey at UC Berkeley reshaped Amaury and Baptiste’s outlook on success and how to build a venture. 

For Amaury, his time at UC Berkeley marked a shift in mindset. He said, “Here in Berkeley, everything is possible.” Similarly, Baptiste noted that his experience at UC Berkeley opened him to “dream big.” He said, “When I arrived, I had this small consulting agency and never thought about raising money. Seeing all these amazing students with huge goals motivated me.” 

When asked to share advice for aspiring founders, Amaury noted the importance of taking initiative, rather than waiting for the “perfect” moment. 

“Don’t wait to start. I’ve spoken to many classmates and friends who say, ‘I’m just waiting for an idea,’ or ‘I’m just waiting for the perfect moment to start.’ But I would say that the perfect moment to start was yesterday. The next perfect moment is today.”

Amaury added, “Remember that you’re not looking for an idea itself—you’re looking for a problem to solve. Problems are everywhere. And when you find a great problem, you can find a great opportunity.”

Once a problem is identified, Baptiste recommends that founders approach the building process with a clear intent. He said, “Never build before you’re sure that you’re building the right thing. It’s worth it to spend the extra 100 hours doing customer research to make sure that you’re building the right thing for your customer. Don’t waste time building before you’re sure that’s what your potential customer wants.”

What’s Next for Pilea

Amaury and Baptiste believe that Pilea has the potential to disrupt the entire e-commerce industry. In the next few years, they hope to expand the platform’s capabilities into a full-fledged solution that is not only able to detect flaws on e-commerce websites but also to create code to resolve the issue and implement the change to create the best-performing version of the website. 

Baptiste added, “If we succeed in the next two or three years building this amazing tool that automatically improves e-commerce websites and makes the user experience more customized and seamless, that would be a big success for us.”

Additionally, both founders emphasized the importance of creating lasting impact in their work. 

Amaury said, “I would love to see Pilea completely change the e-commerce industry as a whole. That would be amazing—having a long-lasting impact in the next 10, 20, and even 50 years.”

Pilea was recently accepted into the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Association, a startup accelerator in New York, where they will continue to grow their venture. Visit https://pilea.vercel.app/ for more information on exploring the product further.

If you are a university student interested in technology entrepreneurship and innovation, or if your university is interested in partnering with SCET Berkeley for your study abroad requirements, please reach out to David Law, Director of Global Academic Programs (dlaw@berkeley.edu)