Interviewing Alexandre Pereira: 2501.ai and autonomous agents for enterprise IT

In this episode, Bart and Murilo sit down with Alexandre Pereira, co-founder & CEO of 2501.ai — the Paris- and NY-based startup building autonomous AI agents that don't just spot infrastructure incidents, they fix them. We dig into why the real blue ocean is the on-prem, legacy enterprise world the cloud never absorbed (JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Société Générale are still mostly on-premise), why roughly half of 2501's work is safety and guardrails rather than the AI itself, and why a privacy-first deployment means they almost never reach for Claude. Alexandre breaks down the model landscape — Qwen vs. GPT-OSS for Windows Server, the “skateboard benchmark”, and why a niche French firewall like Stormshield defeats every frontier model — plus €10M raised across a pan-European cap table and what Europe's pre-seed scene gets right and wrong.

🙋 Guest: Alexandre Pereira — Co-founder & CEO, 2501.ai
🌐 2501.ai
📩 Connect with Alexandre on LinkedIn

Chapters

• (00:00) Intro: autonomous agents that fix enterprise IT
• (01:00) Meet Alexandre: from Decathlon at 18 to founding 2501
• (03:50) Genesis: LLM chaining, AutoGPT, and Devin's $100M moment
• (10:05) What 2501 does: automating IT maintenance for big corporates
• (13:34) Autonomy vs. safety: why half the work is guardrails
• (16:57) Earning trust: proving it alongside the customer
• (25:00) The on-prem blue ocean nobody is serving
• (29:30) Model wars: Qwen, GPT-OSS, and the skateboard benchmark
• (35:15) Privacy-first deployments and the future of open weights
• (41:03) Roadmap: observability and cybersecurity
• (45:30) Raising €10M and Europe's pre-seed reality