Praedon, a spin-off from CERMICS and CIL, awarded the Grand Prix at the iLab 2026 competition

The start-up Praedon, a spin-off from CERMICS and the Co-Innovation Lab, is one of the 10 Grand Prix winners of the iLab 2026 competition, a competition for innovative deep-tech start-ups organised by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

The Grand Prix category recognises projects “deemed particularly promising, with a particular focus on those with a significant impact in terms of sustainable development and societal benefits”.

Praedon creates AI foundation models that combine deep learning and optimisation to maximise business KPIs whilst ensuring compliance with complex industrial constraints

Founded at the end of 2025 by Axel Parmentier, Maximilian Schiffer, Louis Bouvier, Léo Baty, and Silja Woehrle, Praedon creates AI models that combine deep learning and optimization to streamline industrial processes while ensuring compliance with complex business constraints.

Praedon is pushing the boundaries of deep tech by uniting machine learning and operations research through Decision-Focused Learning (DFL). Unlike standard systems that separate prediction from decision-making, Praedon unifies them using differentiable optimizers. Its technology is based on two layers. In the upstream learning module, deep neural networks process volatile contextual data. In the downstream combinatorial optimization layer, optimization solvers translate physical and operational realities into strict mathematical constraints.

Praedon thus leverages data and deep learning to make better decisions, while ensuring the operational safety essential to digital and ecological transitions.