VZ Labs is a technology atelier building useful AI products.
Our current mission is to uncover and craft the mechanics through which commerce will be conducted in a 5 year horizon, particularly exploring the adjacent possible ✦ The set of all first-order combinations of existing primitives. What can be built with the tools at hand, right now. Example: Before smartphones existed, mobile apps weren't possible. Once smartphones appeared, millions of apps became suddenly possible: they entered the adjacent possible. On the night of June 20th 2024, the public release of Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet dramatically expanded the adjacent possible.
We believe there is a gap between AI models capabilities and their current usefulness in the real world, and that there is a need for energy towards bridging that gap.
We also believe the current online shopping experience is stuck in a local maxima, that commerce is not in its final form. We pose the broad and open question, will AI impact the way people purchase products? If yes, how?
From those two beliefs we've find our calling, which is to add a layer of programmatic intelligence between human's favorite interface (language), and commerce infrastructure, in any and all verticals.
We've started working towards this future by building châtaigne ✦ How châtaigne works: Concretely, we built a product that allows restaurants to sell their food on WhatsApp using LLMs: customers casually send texts (or voice notes) to the restaurant's phone number on WhatsApp with their order, pay, and get their food delivered. We use LLMs to understand and jot down the customer's order and answer their questions, similar to the role of human clerk at a store. For restaurants: No commission on sales (monthly fee instead), integrates with existing systems, zero operational overhead. For customers: True store prices (vs 30%+ markups on delivery apps), no app downloads, no account creation, just talking. We're not building a platform - for now - but simply allowing restaurants to serve their regular customers at a better price, with better margins and with a better experience. Started early 2025. Live in France and Switzerland across a dozen locations including three major chain. We partnered with Uber to handle deliveries of our orders throughout the two countries. Why WhatsApp? Because ~every economically active individual uses it daily. Being on WhatsApp brings a lot of constraints but allows us to remove layers of friction by existing where our customers are already present, further pushing toward our quest to for a interface-less product.
We're now working in parallel on a further iteration of our vision: a vertical-agnostic product that would allow any e-commerce store to sell their products through any communication channel via natural language.
VZ Labs is based in Paris but we are potentially open to remote positions for exceptional individuals.
We're currently a team of 3 FTE + 2 contractors.
With VZ Labs we aim to build a new category of company, one where each team member has the force and autonomy to lead entire projects. This requires taste, agency, openness and contagiously high energy levels.
More importantly, we produce serious work with an unserious vibe.