‘They immediately took me in:’ how one American entrepreneur found startup success in France

Olivier Jeannel's market-disrupting business idea started more than a decade ago as an intuition.

Mr Jeannel, a now 45-year-old French-American, had moved from California to Paris in the early 2000s for his master's degree.

After coming up with multiple business ideas that never quite made it out the door, he landed on an issue that desperately needed solving: making phone calls accessible for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. 

The idea's main source of power? It spoke directly to Mr Jeannel's lived experience – the Californian was diagnosed with severe hearing loss at age two.

"This is it," he told The Connexion. "It made sense, it fitted with my story, my experience, my career."

This intuition led him to launch Rogervoice, an app providing real-time, word-for-word captioning and text-to-speech conversion for phone calls, in 2014. Since then, it has grown to encompass 80 employees, not including freelancers and consultants, and is available in 52 countries. 

One of the keys to his early success was having the American cultural knowledge of what it takes to launch a startup, create a business plan, pitch and sell. Yet despite the US' reputation as ideal for young businesses, Mr Jeannel decided to start Rogervoice in France.

"When I launched, it coincided with the first accelerator programmes in France at the time, and so they immediately took me in," Mr Jeannel said. There was just a small circle of entrepreneurs at that time, he recalled, far from the startup craze overtaking France today.

As it turned out, a combination of timing, market gaps and strategic partnerships would make the country a fruitful terrain for the future of Rogervoice.

Launching in France

For Mr Jeannel, born to two French parents, France was not as distant culturally as it could be to other Americans.

He found it natural to settle there after his master's, and, as it so happened, discovered the country provided just the right market for an app like Rogervoice. In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act drove the creation of more software and communication tools for those who are deaf and hard of hearing. In France, however, there was a gap.

France also became Rogervoice's biggest market because, just a few years after the app was launched, the country passed the Digital Republic Act, which required phone carriers and customer service lines to be accessible to deaf, hard of hearing, deaf-blind, and speech-impaired people.

"I was like, 'Oh my gosh, guys, I'm here, I have an app for this,'" Mr Jeannel said.

Then, there were the unemployment benefits. In France, those under 55 can receive 18 months of unemployment benefit, calculated as a portion of their previous income. After Mr Jeannel left his previous job at Orange, he used this to support himself as he launched Rogervoice.

"It was a perfect storm" of elements bringing Rogervoice to life in France, he said.

That is not to say being American did not have its perks. He launched Rogervoice on a Kickstarter campaign – Kickstarter is a global crowdfunding platform – and at the time it was only available to those with a US bank account.

Additionally, his first fundraising in France was particularly long, taking 12 months to close. The waiting paid off however, when Rogervoice secured 95 business angels that year, most of whom would come back in the second and third years to invest even more money into the project.

"It testifies to, once you're in and people believe in your project, the credibility starts kicking in and people are more willing to open their resources to you," Mr Jeannel said.

Call captioning and beyond

Rogervoice, a play on the expression 'roger that' to communicate that a message was understood, is more than just an app. It is a "gamechanger" for people dealing with difficulties on the phone, Mr Jeannel said.

It also goes beyond just real-time captioning of phone calls, allowing users to block callers, receive voicemails and save transcripts.

Over the years, it has extended to include sign language interpreting services for video calls in France, as well as heightened privacy safeguards. Important for expats between the US and France, Rogervoice has Federal Communications Commission (FCC) certification, so calls for eligible Americans are free.

As many France-based startups grow, the trend has been for them to relocate or expand into a country with more capital – the US, for example. On one hand, it is a logical choice given that funds are more readily available, investors are willing to take more risk, and, with a bigger country, you have more potential clients, Mr Jeannel said. 

In 2026, driven by growing demand, Rogervoice expanded its operations in the US. However, even with this expansion, the app’s social mission has kept the company headquartered and growing in France over the past decade.

"In France, there was nothing when I started in terms of mass market telephone accessibility," Mr Jeannel said.

Today, Rogervoice has deep roots in France through partnerships with various carriers such as SFR and Orange, as well as the government. They have raised some $2.5 million over their funding rounds, and, in April of this year, surpassed 12 million captioned calls.

As Mr Jeannel looks to the future, his focus is visibility. Captioned TV, once added solely for accessibility purposes, has now become the new normal for watching shows and movies – whether for comfort, language learning purposes or to keep the volume down.

He aims for a similar phenomenon to occur with captioned phone calls.

"I want this to be a reference for people," he said.