Julien Simon

Julien Simon bridges the gap between AI research and enterprise reality. While many experts choose either academic research or practical implementation, Julien deliberately combines both. He reads research papers, decrypts the mathematical foundations behind breakthrough methods, and obsesses over translating them into shareable knowledge and solutions that actually work at scale.

As AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital, Julien accelerates cloud and AI initiatives across both the Private Equity and Venture Capital portfolios. With over 30 years of technology experience at AWS, Hugging Face, Arcee AI, Criteo, and other major companies, he brings deep technical expertise combined with executive leadership to help portfolio companies scale from product to engineering to operations to GTM. His approach empowers portfolio companies to achieve superior AI outcomes, accelerate growth, and transform their technology capabilities while maintaining security and cost efficiency.

Julien's career reflects continuous learning across computing's evolution, always grounded in first principles. He's adapted from MySQL web platforms to Generative AI, from programming Motorola 68k processors to optimizing modern AI accelerators, from real-time operating systems to cloud-native architectures. Through every technology shift, he maintains a rigorous approach to building from sound fundamentals. Each new domain becomes an opportunity to learn, adapt, write code, and apply fresh concepts while staying grounded in fundamental engineering practices.

Julien's mission? To demystify buzzwords and cut through industry hype to focus on what actually works in production.