LVMH Group has announced the winners of its LVMH Innovation Award, “which recognizes the most innovative and high-potential startups helping to reinvent the luxury industry”, according to the group’s press release. The three winners were named on Wednesday at tech conference Vivatech in Paris.
“The reason I agreed to be a founding shareholder of Vivatech is that I was told it was an event for startups,” said Arnault at the opening ceremony of Vivatech, which he co-founded and is marking its 10th anniversary this year. “I run a startup. I consider my group as a startup. We are a conglomerate of startups. The goal of the startup is to grow but you must keep the spirit and the spirit is still there. I think it’s the reason why we are quite successful.”
After touring the LVMH booth, Arnault awarded the Best Impact Prize to French startup Fairly Made, a platform dedicated to raw material traceability, supply chain transparency, and environmental impact measurement. Fairly Made already works with many LVMH’s fashion and leather goods division houses.
Synthesia won the Best Business Award “for its AI-powered enterprise video-creation technology at scale and in multiple languages, opening new possibilities for communication, training, and sale”, the release read. Earlier this year, the UK-based company completed its Series E funding round, reaching a valuation of approximately $4 billion. The round was led by Google Ventures, with participation from Nvidia’s venture capital arm.
Bernard Arnault and Vivatech co-founder Maurice Levy on the Vivatech stage.
Photo: Getty Images
“Synthesia has now become a true scale-up,” Franck Le Moal, LVMH Group IT and technology director, says. “What makes the company especially relevant to us is the large number of employees and team members we need to train across our industrial sites, stores, and facilities. We see significant potential in its ability to generate training content, personalize it for different audiences, and translate it in real time, which is extremely valuable.” A dozen LVMH houses already work with Synthesia, including Parfum Christian Dior, Moët Hennessy, Tiffany & Co., Hublot, and Loewe, according to Le Moal.
New York-based Bluefish AI won LVMH’s Most Promising Award. Co-founded by Alex Sherman, Andrei Dunca and Jing Feng, the platform measures brand image and product positioning across AI engines.
Le Moal explains: “With the extremely significant growth of LLMs — such as OpenAI, Perplexity, Gemini, Mistral, as well as Chinese LLMs — we are witnessing a very important shift taking place in the digital industry. We are somewhat moving from SEO [search engine optimization] to GEO [generative engine optimization, a newer concept tied to AI search tools]. Our clients and prospects are increasingly using tools to search for information, to learn about our brands, and to look up information about our products.”
