It’s proven, there are entities in the sky that scrutinize our actions. Nothing religious in there, it is about the satellites whose images a French specialist in AI uses to analyze what is happening on earth. This Frenchman is Preligens, and he caught the eye of the Ministry of the Armed Forces. Because the start-up is in the process of tremendously improving its intelligence capabilities. It is in a Parisian building in the 9th arrondissement that the Preligens teams reveal to us how their tools work.
First Robin, an AI-powered satellite imagery analysis solution. On his world map, red dots. “The areas that you label as sites of interest”, explains Aurélien Debièvre, in charge of product marketing. From then on, the Preligens program analyzes the images of these places with particular care and is responsible for detecting the presence of a host of military equipment there: planes, vessels, armored vehicles, missiles… A feat. “In classic photos, the object often occupies a tenth of the visual. An airplane on a satellite image only occupies a billionth”, argues Arnaud Guérin, co-founder and CEO of product and technology. Especially since Preligens manages to identify specific models of machines (bomber Tupolev Tu-160, etc.).
Where an analyst would take hours or even days to do this painstaking work, artificial intelligence does it in seconds. A breakthrough that totally changes the game in such a sensitive area. “The tool automatically detects changes in the situation thanks to AI, so you can quickly give the alert”, underlines Arnaud Guérin. Moreover, intelligence analysts are concentrating – and it is logical – their efforts on the hot spots of the globe, such as Ukraine at the moment. “That leaves fewer resources to monitor the rest of the world,” says General Grégoire de Saint-Quentin, senior VP of Preligens and former deputy chief of operations for the general staff. AI thus limits the risks that threats escape our radar.
Detect the arrival of combat aircraft
Above all, Preligens software carefully classifies observation data so as to follow the evolution of an area over time. “This is what makes the tool so powerful: it identifies anomalies and draws the analyst’s attention to them”, points out Renaud Allioux, co-founder and head of innovation. For example, the presence of a higher number of military vehicles than usual or the arrival of a type of combat aircraft never before observed in this area. Preligens thus saw the Russian air base of Taganrog radically change appearance and populate with a myriad of fighter planes, helicopters and drones after Moscow invaded Ukraine.
Of course, AI is not omniscient. Tarps, nets, decoys… The adversary can use various subterfuges to try to keep his activities secret. And the weather does not always work in favor of the intelligence services. After optical imagery, Preligens quickly added infrared and radar images to the analyzed formats, which make light of clouds. Several factors have enabled this meteoric acceleration of intelligence capabilities. First, the Copernican revolution in the field of satellites. While these devices have long been complex, heavy and therefore expensive to ship, new models that are much smaller, lighter and more affordable have appeared in recent years. This makes astronomers cringe when they see the sky cluttered with objects disturbing their patient study of what is happening far from us, but it makes the “big ears” happy, by multiplying the sources of fresh terrestrial images. .
At the same time, AI has made great progress in image processing, which offers many perspectives. Recently, the generation of images has made a lot of noise but, at the same time, opens up the possibility of analyzing the physical world to an unprecedented degree. New buildings, agricultural land, road and maritime traffic… by scrutinizing the perimeter of a country, some AIs are now able to assess its economic health quite finely. Others scrutinize the health of forests and oceans to track the changing climate. In this bubbling field, AIs specialized in intelligence such as those of Preligens occupy a strategic place. “Artificial intelligence appears as the game changer of this 21st century,” observes Hubert Raymond, head of innovation at the French land and air-land defense and security industries group GICAT.
“Defence is not a market for sprinters but for marathon runners”
However, attacking a market as particular as that of defense is not an easy task for a start-up. Certainly, this sphere is fond of new technologies. But the founders of Preligens do not immediately realize that in this secret and bureaucratic world, landing a contract takes much longer. You have to be approved by dozens of people, understand the obscure sabir of this ministry, fit into complex budget schedules and be reassured about your ability to provide service over the very long term. “Defence is not a market for sprinters but for marathon runners”, confirms Nicolas Berdou, who supervised Bpifrance’s investment in Preligens and has since been a director of the company.
In this world where everything – or almost – is a matter of life or death, the degree of requirement is, moreover, very high. Preligens has therefore formed a shock team. Among its 260 employees are veterans of the Ministry of the Armed Forces who help it understand customer needs and more than 140 AI engineers. “It’s one of the biggest AI teams in France,” says Nicolas Berdou. Preligens was also able to reassure the defense actors on an essential point in their eyes: confidentiality. Its products can be adapted to a customer’s needs without the latter having to provide any internal data, and once they have purchased a program “our customers know how to encapsulate our software in their system in such a way that ‘they precisely control the information that enters and leaves them,’ says Arnaud Guérin
Efforts that paid off. Last October, Preligens signed a large contract of 240 million euros with the French Directorate General of Armaments (DGA). And the start-up also counts NATO, the United Kingdom, Japan and the American army as customers. Nice shots because, as Nicolas Berdou reminds us, “in the sphere of defence, countries tend to favor their national players”. The challenge for Preligens is now to strengthen its links with its international markets, in particular the United States. A market alone bigger than all the other countries it targets combined. But the co-founder Arnaud Guérin specifies from the outset: “We will not sell this technology to just any country.” The French State exercises de facto control over the export of the most sensitive technologies. However, Preligens has drawn up an ethical charter, showing its desire to go a step further than the legal framework. If no country is mentioned, we understand between the lines of this charter that regimes with authoritarian tendencies and unstable states threatening to topple over are persona non grata.
Algorithms protected from hackers
However, the company must take drastic cybersecurity measures to ensure that its sensitive technologies do not fall into the wrong hands. “When we work on sensitive subjects, we do it on specific infrastructures, disconnected from the Internet and equipped with adequate protections. Our algorithms are protected by cryptographic techniques. But what preserves us perhaps the most, c It is that our programs are constantly evolving anyway because we are constantly improving them”, argues Arnaud Guérin. It is true that in defense more than elsewhere, it is important to stay one step ahead of the opponent.
Because if AI and satellite technologies give us unprecedented intelligence capabilities, the army is well aware that they could eventually also be exploited by the enemy. Defense pros are also worried that AI coupled with increasingly powerful sensors will one day manage to “make the ocean transparent”, points out Ulrike Franke, researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), “this could expose the position of the submarines”. And maybe challenge the whole nuclear deterrent system.