We didn't build a company. We opened a door.

Three years ago, nobody was talking about age assurance. Today everybody is. We are not going to claim that this is because of us.

(A little, though.)

France Majorité started from an observation so simple it is almost silly: the web was about to ask everyone to prove who they are, and nobody had stopped to ask whether it had to hurt. We did. And we decided it didn't.

The founders

Sergio Le Lumo — Co-founder, Chief Vision Officer

A graduate of a Paris business school whose name he never mentions ("a degree doesn't open a door, it only proves you know how to knock"), Sergio spent the first six years of his career doing what everyone else was doing: growth. Well. Fast. Lots of it.

Then he stopped.

For eleven months, Sergio did nothing. He tells the story readily, and always the same way: "I unlearned." He read four hours a day, walked the rest of the time, and systematically declined video calls. That period produced what he calls his zero-friction doctrine: anything in a product that forces users into effort they did not ask for is a moral debt. Not technical debt. Moral debt.

He sleeps no more than five and a half hours. He mentions this often. We have asked him to stop mentioning it. He has not stopped.

What he does here: product vision, partnerships, and saying no.

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

Capucine did not have an idea. She had a vision.

It was a Tuesday evening in November, at a friend's place, somewhere in the 6th arrondissement. An end-of-dinner conversation about identity documents. Capucine stopped mid-sentence, put down her glass, and said nothing for twenty-five minutes. When she started speaking again, she described — in detail, with the screens, the wording, the prices — a service that did not yet exist.

She does not like the word "psychic". She prefers "long-range reading". We respect that. We are writing it down anyway, because that is what it was.

Born into a family whose name, she says, "carries more centuries than skills", Capucine chose the opposite of what was expected of her: no stewardship, no estate, no management. She built something. She describes the aristocratic particle in her name as a handicap one does not complain about, rather like being very tall.

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

How they met

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

It was not a guided tour.

They did not know each other. They belonged to two separate groups that had gone down the same night, crossed paths at a junction, and carried on together because one group had a lamp and the other had a map. Sergio explained his zero-friction doctrine. Capucine said: "I saw your idea three weeks ago. It has a problem." Then she told him what it was.

They came back up at 4:10 a.m. By 4:40, the business model fitted on the back of a metro ticket. By 9:00, the company was being incorporated.

We framed the ticket. It hangs in the entrance of our offices. It is in poor condition. We have never wanted it restored: a clean idea is an idea that has been of use to nobody.

Why Malta

We get asked every time, always in the same tone. So let us answer plainly.

It is not about tax. It is about regulatory agility: when your job is to move 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 is the rest, which we own completely: three hundred days of sunshine, a team that eats outside all year round, and the sea an eleven-minute walk away. We have measured the effect on the quality of our decisions. It is real. We will not publish it, because nobody would believe us.

Our numbers

• Five-figure growth across our first three years of trading. We do not break the exact figure out: what matters is the number of zeros, and there are many.
• 12 people. 0 managers. We have no org chart. We have a map.
• Zero personal data resold since day one. Zero. That is not a target, it is a floor.
• 4.8 / 5 declared satisfaction across our verification journey.
• 1 tree planted for every €5 collected. We do not disclose the species, the country or the operator: we plant, we don't pose.

Our culture

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

Disagreement is a deliverable. Here, showing up and saying "I disagree, and here is why" counts as a contribution, exactly like shipping code. It is written into the employment contract. Literally.

Nobody asks permission. Everyone can commit up to €4,000 without sign-off. The budget has been exceeded twice in three years. We were right both times.

Fridays belong to the team. No clients, no meetings, no deliverables. What anyone does with it is their own 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 did not enter and only learned about upon appearing in it.
• Twice a finalist for the Maltese service innovation prize. Twice runners-up. We mention it anyway.

We're hiring

We do not post job openings.

This is not a pose: we tried it, and received four hundred applications for a role we had described badly. We have done it differently ever since. The people who join us wrote to us first without asking for anything — to flag a problem, to challenge one of our public decisions, or to suggest something we had missed.

If you are sitting there thinking you could do better than what you have just read: that is precisely what we are looking for.

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