Lucile Hamon, Batiphoenix

By Sophie Videment

PER 2017 : And the Winner is… Batiphoenix. The 7th edition of the PER (Prix Entrepreneure Responsable) was awarded on the 7th of November to a young and passionate start-upper : Lucile Hamon, co-founder of Batiphoenix, a BtoB marketplace for the re-use of building materials. The vibrant 25 years old woman who holds a passion for environmental issues told us the story behind the creation of her start-up.

Sophie Videment: Congratulations on winning the prize, I hope that this year of PWN special expertises will be extremely fruitful for you. Before getting into the genesis of the start-up, can you please resume in a few words what Batiphoenix is, including who your clients are?

Lucile Hamon: Our punchline is: “The goal of Batiphoenix is to transform the waste of today into tomorrow’s resources”.

Batiphoenix is a marketplace where members of the building industry buy and sell reusable building materials of all kind: doors, glass, paint…Typically, sellers are big construction companies such as Bouygues or VINCI Construction and buyers are smaller contractors. We do not provide any storage; the buyer pays online, and collects the materials directly on the construction sites of the seller.

SV: You are today a 25-year-old-woman, co-founder of a start-up in the construction industry located in Station F, what a ride it must have been! How did you come up with the idea of Batiphoenix? How did it happen? Tell us the story which led to this creation.

LH: I have always been very concerned by environmental issues and some years ago founded a not-for-profit called Waste me Up. I worked as an independent consultant in countries including India, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Sri Lanka where I performed strategic analysis and on-site operational management to optimize the waste and recycling. Some countries do not have efficient disposal systems and the trash is often just let on a piece of land or thrown into the ocean. But large companies such as Suez Environment or Engie need to comply with international sustainability regulations when they operate in these countries. So I was trained by these big companies about the ways of reducing waste and recycling and spent 9 month entirely abroad. During my training period in France, I went to many disposals and was very surprised: we, in France, have efficient recycling processes for our personal trash (the glass, the papers…), but this is not the case for construction materials. The construction industry is the biggest producer of waste in France with 240 million tons per year. It also costs a lot of money to construction companies: 500 million euros every year. I wanted to find a solution for saving these materials from the trash and reusing them as raw materials. I met Kesia, my partner at Batiphoenix, during my final year at HEC Paris. She was a site manager in the construction industry and we shared the same values on environmental issues. We started to work on the Batiphoenix project during our last year of school. We complement each other: As an engineer, she is more technical, while I am more business minded. We integrated Station F in July 2017, officially started the company in August and made our first sales at the end of August.

SV What drove you to become an entrepreneur?

LH I like the freedom of having my own company and I wanted to do something that had a direct impact on the environment. I wanted to measure concretely this impact on a daily basis. This is what drove me to be an entrepreneur.

SV Does it change anything to be a women in the construction industry?

LH Yes, it does change something to be a woman and to be very young. People question our credibility, so it is important that we both have an experience in the field. But for the moment, I would say that being a woman has mostly helped open doors.

SV Where do you expect Batiphoenix to be in 5 years?

LH I hope that in 5 years, we will have helped improve the energy transition and that using on-site reused materials will be a usual habit for all construction companies. For Ourselves, I hope that Batiphoenix will be the leader in this field and that we will remain independent.

SV Thank you Lucile, we look forward following up on the progress of your start-up in a year and in the meantime, I wish you all the best !