We didn't build a company. We kicked a door open.

Three years back, nobody was talking about age assurance. Now everybody is. We're not going to sit here and claim that's down to us.

(Bit of it is, but.)

France Majorité started from something so obvious it's almost daft: the internet was about to ask every single person to prove who they are, and not one bugger had stopped to ask whether it needed to hurt this much. We did. And we reckoned it didn't.

The founders

Sergio Le Lumo — Co-founder, Chief Vision Officer

He went to a Paris business school he never names ("a degree doesn't open a door, mate, it only proves you know how to knock"), and Sergio spent his first six years doing exactly what everyone else was doing: growth. Well. Fast. Heaps of it.

Then he pulled up.

For eleven months Sergio did absolutely nothing. He'll tell you about it, and always the same way: "I unlearned." Four hours of reading a day, walking the rest, and knocking back every video call that came his way. Out of that came what he calls his zero-friction doctrine: anything in a product that makes people do work they never asked for is a moral debt. Not technical debt. Moral debt.

He sleeps five and a half hours a night. He brings it up a lot. We've asked him to stop bringing it up. He has not stopped.

What he does round here: product vision, partnerships, and saying nah.

Capucine de La Richa des deux Suddettes — Co-founder, Chief Intuition Officer

Capucine didn't have an idea. She had a vision.

Tuesday night in November, at a mate's place somewhere in the 6th. End-of-dinner chat about ID documents. Capucine stopped dead halfway through a sentence, put her glass down and said nothing for twenty-five minutes. When she started up again she described — in detail, with the screens, the wording, the prices — a service that didn't exist yet.

She doesn't like the word "psychic". She prefers "long-range reading". We respect that. We're writing it down anyway, because that's exactly what it was.

Born into a family whose name, she reckons, "carries more centuries than skills", Capucine went and did the opposite of what was expected: no estate, no stewardship, no managing anything. She built something instead. She describes the posh bit in the middle of her name as a handicap you don't get to complain about, a bit like being very tall.

What she does round here: editorial direction, internal culture, and the calls nobody else wants to make.

How they met

In the Paris catacombs. On 11 November. Twenty metres under Place Denfert-Rochereau.

It was not a guided tour.

They'd never met. Two separate groups had gone down the same night, crossed at a junction, and kept going together because one lot had a lamp and the other lot had a map. Sergio explained the zero-friction doctrine. Capucine said: "I saw your idea three weeks ago. It's got a problem." Then she told him what it was.

They came back up at ten past four in the morning. By twenty to five the business model fitted on the back of a metro ticket. By nine the company was being registered.

We framed the ticket. It hangs by the front door. It's in shocking condition and we've never once wanted it restored: a clean idea is an idea that's been no use to anyone.

Why Malta

We cop this one every time, always in the same tone. So here's the straight answer.

It's not about tax. It's about regulatory agility: when your job is moving a proof around without moving an identity around, you need a regulator who picks up the phone. Ours picks up. In France we were on our fourth contact person in eight months.

And then there's the rest of it, which we'll own without blushing: three hundred days of sun, a team that eats outside all year round, and the water an eleven-minute walk away. We've measured what that does to the quality of our decisions. It's real. We won't publish it, because nobody would believe us.

Our numbers

• Five-figure growth over our first three trading years. We don't break the exact figure out: what counts is the number of zeros, and there's a fair few.
• 12 people. 0 managers. We haven't got an org chart. We've got a map.
• Zero personal data flogged on since day one. Zero. That's not a target, that's the floor.
• 4.8 / 5 declared satisfaction across the verification journey.
• 1 tree planted for every 5 € taken. We don't disclose the species, the country or who does the planting: we plant, we don't pose.

Our culture

We don't meet to decide. Meetings are for announcing a decision that's already been made, or they don't happen. Our average: 1 hour 40 of meetings per person per week.

Disagreeing is a deliverable. Round here, fronting up and saying "nah, I disagree, and here's why" counts as work, same as shipping code. It's written into the employment contract. Literally.

Nobody asks permission. Anyone can spend up to 4,000 € without a sign-off. The budget's been blown twice in three years. We were right both times.

Fridays belong to the crew. No clients, no meetings, no deliverables. What anyone does with it is their business, and we never ask for a write-up.

Awards

• Winner of the Mediterranean Trust & Identity Award, Emerging Player category (2025).
• Named in the top 40 scale-ups to watch in Southern Europe by a ranking we never entered and only found out about once we were in it.
• Twice a finalist for the Maltese service innovation prize. Twice the bridesmaid. We're mentioning it anyway.

We're hiring

We don't post jobs.

That's not a pose: we tried it once and got four hundred applications for a role we'd described badly. Been doing it different ever since. The people who end up here wrote to us first without asking for anything — to flag a problem, to pull us up on a decision we'd made in public, or to point out something we'd missed.

If you're sitting there reckoning you could do better than what you've just read: that's exactly the sort we're after.

France Majorité — Malta. Founded in 2023. Still independent.