BUILT TO THRIVE: HOW XAVIER STARKLOFF TURNED A DISMISSED CATEGORY INTO A CONSUMER LEADER

When you enter Joko’s offices in Paris’ 3rd arrondissement, the first thing you notice is not the techy or consumer style atmosphere, but the refined and elegant style.

There are no aggressively colorful walls, no neon slogans trying too hard to signal startup culture, no carefully manufactured coolness. The space is full of natural light and large open volumes. Sofas, plants, wood, glass, discreet artwork: everything follows the same restrained aesthetic language. The design feels premium without being ostentatious, thoughtful without feeling staged. Nothing appears accidental.

Xavier Starkloff, Joko’s co-founder and CEO, has always believed that beautiful offices foster ambition and creativity. “People do better work when they’re surrounded by beautiful things,” he says. The sentence could sound superficial coming from another founder, but at Joko, it feels more like an operating principle. This attention to detail extends far beyond the office itself.

Joko, on the surface, is a rewards platform. The company indeed offers rewards to more than 6 million users across France and the United States, boosting their purchasing power whenever they shop online or offline with merchants like Amazon, Nike, Uber, Apple, Airbnb, or thousands of others. But reducing Joko to cash back is to miss what the company is really building and how far it intends to go.

For decades, the category had remained stagnant: useful but uninspiring, a structurally large market but with poor execution. The user experiences were clunky, the products hard to navigate, the branding absent. Joko approached the category differently. Leveraging the emergence of open banking infrastructure in Europe, the founders believed they could reinvent the experience entirely, not only technologically, but emotionally and visually, too. People love getting rewarded, even the wealthiest (American Express built an empire on it), but they expect and deserve a great product and experience, and that is what Joko set out to bring.

In France especially, that level of obsession around consumer product quality remains relatively rare. Xavier is obsessed with changing the way consumer products are built and has organized a culture around user obsession. Inside the company, every employee reads user feedback daily. Everyone uses the product themselves, and since recently, every employee can fix bugs or build features and push them directly into production, through their own internal AI coding platform with built-in safety guardrails. The distance between builders and users is intentionally kept extremely small. “We are not building one more cash back app” explains Xavier “we are building a new shopping experience for consumers”.

Seven years after launch, Joko has become the leader in France, continuously expanding its product with features like buy now pay later, a loyalty wallet, and price comparison, opened in the US market and launched its new AI shopping assistant Juno, the boldest expression yet of its ambition to reinvent how consumers shop. The category itself has barely changed. Joko, meanwhile, changed almost everything around it.

Against the odds: how 3 young graduates took on a category everyone had written off

Xavier did not grow up around entrepreneurs. There were no startup dinner-table conversations, no mythology of risk-taking or company-building around him growing up. Xavier did not initially follow what would traditionally be considered an entrepreneurial path. Instead, he followed the route of French academic excellence: École polytechnique, then the Corps des mines, the most prestigious educational tracks that lead its graduates straight into the upper echelons of the French State. It was there that he met Alexandre Hollocou, future co-founder and CTO of Joko. Alexandre recalls: "It was an instant friendship connection, the first time we met, we talked for hours about our projects and ideas, completely oblivious to the other students." He adds: "I immediately thought to myself that this guy was going to do something incredible."

Together, they took a course called “Web Mining” back in 2013 where students were asked to scrape data, build machine-learning models, and imagine business opportunities around them. Xavier and Alexandre decided to predict the commercial success of movies using data extracted from IMDb, the Internet Movie Database. “Immediately we wanted to spin off the project, talk to film producers to test the appetite, but we soon realized it wasn’t a very good business,” they admit today.

But something more important had slowly started taking shape during that period: the realization that they genuinely enjoyed building things together. It was the beginning of a friendship and professional partnership.

After a first internship in a large corporate that moved too slowly for his taste, Xavier left with one clear conviction: he wanted to build something inside a fast growing company. He was originally supposed to move to the United States to work at Algolia, shortly after the company emerged from Y Combinator. Then, two weeks before departure, the plan fell through for administrative reasons related to visa applications and he had no plan B. But through a series of coincidences, he met Paul Midy, then CEO of Jumia Travel and today a member of the French National Assembly. Jumia urgently needed someone in Senegal. Xavier accepted almost immediately. Two weeks later, he was on a plane to Dakar.

It was a totally different experience. Jumia, the ‘Amazon for Africa’, was growing at extraordinary speed. Teams were building in real time, adapting constantly, solving operational problems with intensity and urgency. Xavier discovered something there that would shape the rest of his career: he loved the adrenaline of building consumer products used by millions of people.

It was also in Dakar that Xavier met Nicolas Salat-Baroux, who would later become co-founder and CRO of Joko. The two found themselves working together on weekends at a local beachfront hotel, drawn by the same appetite for intensity and execution. "He was a real execution machine," Nicolas recalls. "Not only brilliant academically, he had the pragmatism of an entrepreneur. We clicked instantly."

Years later, when Xavier and Nicolas brainstormed together to look for the name of the company they wanted to build with Alexandre, they remembered this period. The name Joko actually emerged inside a Starbucks near Saint-Lazare station in Paris. After weeks spent brainstorming, searching for something simple, modern, dynamic, a name that meant nothing and could eventually become anything, Xavier thought about “jokko,” a Wolof word roughly meaning connection or community, a reference to Senegal. They dropped one “k” to keep it simple and easy to pronounce. Nicolas worried people would not know how to pronounce it. So they started asking strangers inside the Starbucks to read the word aloud from a piece of paper. One after another, they pronounced it exactly the way the founders hoped: “Joko.” The trademark was available and Joko was born.

However, before building the company together, both Xavier and Alexandre still had to complete their obligations within the French state system as part of their track at Corps des mines. Alexandre joined the Ministry of Defense and Xavier joined the Ministry of Economy and Finance.

As Xavier was working there, the PSD2 - the European regulation that would unlock open banking - was being voted through. He instantly understood the massive opportunity: open banking was about to unlock new economic models around personalization, rewards, and commerce, and change the relationship between consumers and merchants, giving consumers more power over their own data. At the time, he was continuously brainstorming with Nicolas, then working in Nigeria, and Alexandre, who was completing his PhD in machine learning while working for the Ministry of Defense.

Eventually, Xavier brought them together. The founding moment of Joko happened in a Mexican restaurant near Les Halles in Paris, where Alexandre and Nicolas met for the first time. The chemistry was immediate and the day after they decided to quit their jobs and started to build together. “Looking back, founding Joko was actually quite irrational,” Xavier admits today. “If we had done too much market research, we probably wouldn’t have started.” Alexandre recalls “I instantly trusted Nicolas, we didn’t do any founder questionnaires or even reference checks on each other, we had the passion and the same objective to build a global consumer company, and it was enough”.

At the time, very little about the opportunity looked attractive from the outside. Consumer apps were notoriously difficult businesses and cash back was considered an unsexy category. The graveyard of failed loyalty startups was already crowded and none of the Joko founders came from retail or payments.

It was not an obvious bet for me, the investment went against all my instincts, yet there was something unusually compelling about the founders themselves. Every time we met them, I came back with a long list of questions and doubts which I openly shared, and each time, they had extremely articulate answers and strong consumer intuition. I still wasn’t completely sure about the market itself, but I found them incredibly smart, agile and ambitious. My belief was: even if this specific model didn’t work, they would figure something out. Partech ended up leading Joko’s €1 million seed round in 2019. As of today, they are my best example of why seed investors should back exceptional teams first, no matter the market they operate in.

An engineer mindset to build a consumer app

In the very competitive consumer market, there is no moat until you build a large network of merchants or a strong consumer base, which means execution makes all the difference, and this is where Joko's founding team excels. Their high intensity shows up everywhere: their efficiency, work ethic, strong attention to detail, and decision process grounded in data. Joko is a consumer app led with an engineer's mindset. For Xavier, being an engineer is fundamentally about breaking down problems and designing elegant systems to solve them and that's also how he thinks about the role of CEO. The job isn't only charisma, storytelling and vision, it's solving difficult problems continuously, while preserving long-term coherence.

To build an excellent consumer product, details matter and all the decisions should be thoughtful. Xavier is obsessed with details and goes deep on all decisions, not just the strategic calls that land on every CEO's desk, but the granular details that most founders would comfortably wave past, trusting someone else to catch them. Nicolas explains "Even when he has a lot on his plate, he will go deep into every topic, the big ones and the small ones, because down the road, problems often come from the small things that weren't dealt with properly at the time." For Xavier, no detail is truly small, it’s only small before it compounds.

This combination of relentless attention and consistently high standards, applies uniformly across everything he touches without missing the long term vision. Xavier's decision-making is also shaped by a long-term orientation that sets him apart from much of the startup world. Where many companies optimize aggressively for short-term investor signaling, Xavier consistently chooses decisions that build more durable outcomes, even when they require patience. "When we focus solely on tiny steps," he explains, "we risk getting stuck on a small hill, mistaking it for the summit. The real peak — the global optimum — might be on an entirely different mountain. To reach it, you must be willing to go downhill before climbing upward again." Alexandre agrees: "His mindset is very ‘first principles’. He is not afraid to be contrarian but he will always push for the rational decision, not the most comfortable and consensual one."

Yet this picture misses one key dimension of Xavier's character: one that people who don't know him closely often overlook. Miya, one of Joko's earliest employees and today Chief of Staff, puts it best: "Xavier is not only a very rational, data-driven CEO, he is really good at reading and analyzing people's emotions, without ever being submerged by them." He is not the kind of founder who lets stress dictate his behavior or allows fear to drive his decisions. In the most difficult moments, what he transmits to those around him is a genuine serenity that however hard the situation, it can be decomposed, understood and solved.

Navigating near-death moments with resilience and clarity

Joko has come close to dying more than once, and each time, the founders responded with the same modus operandi: they locked themselves indoors for the entire week and weekend, worked until late in the evening, defined the problem with precision, explored every solution available, challenged each one rigorously, chose the best and executed it with high intensity. Xavier explains “we never had a strong disagreement, because we debate arguments against arguments, never opinions against opinions."

The first test came in March 2020, when Joko launched its Series A fundraising process on precisely the wrong week: the day France entered its first lockdown. Almost overnight, the business lost nearly 90% of its revenue, employees feared layoffs, and nobody could say with any confidence when restrictions would be lifted or what the market would look like on the other side. Rather than pause and wait, the founders made the counterintuitive decision to change their entire business model in the middle of an active fundraising process and the growth picked up again. It worked: they convinced Hedosophia to back their Series A, and signed the term sheet on the exact day restrictions were lifted.

Two years later, in 2022, the founders found themselves navigating another storm. They were preparing to raise their Series B just as the NASDAQ entered one of its most violent corrections in years, with roughly nine months of runway remaining and a fundraising environment that had turned hostile almost everywhere at once. Eventually, after an exhausting process, a term sheet arrived: €15 million of new capital, but carrying aggressive terms taking advantage of the situation — the kind of deal many investors were pushing onto founders at the time, knowing they had little choice. Xavier, Nicolas and Alexandre chose to refuse it anyway, accepting the cash risk rather than the structural damage, and charted a different course entirely: freeze hiring, shut down everything non-core, and manage cash with surgical precision until the company could stand on its own again. Even then, Xavier did not react emotionally — he processed the pressure the way he processes every difficult problem, by slowing down, decomposing the situation carefully, seeking counsel and thinking several moves ahead. "We knew it was a tough decision," he says, "but we deeply knew it was also the best one for the company. And of course, it was probably one of the best decisions we ever made." The bet paid off: in the months that followed, Joko reached profitability and has been self-funded ever since, with revenue now north of €50 million.

The early years of Joko were genuinely hard, consumer apps could be hit hard by market crisis. But through every difficult moment, something about Xavier's rationality and his unshakeable orientation toward the long game always gave me the confidence that they would find a way. To mark our fifth year of partnership, they offered me Stefan Zweig's biography of Magellan — and the choice of book felt like a statement of intent. The story of great exploration is rarely linear. It is mostly uncertainty, wrong turns, and conditions that look impossible from the inside; moments where continuing forward seems like the irrational choice, and turning back would be forgiven by anyone watching. And yet, with the right combination of determination, resilience and clarity of purpose, the journey continues, always imperfectly, never comfortably, but always in the right direction. That is Joko.

Against the current: the European consumer app taking on the US

Seven years after Partech's investment, Xavier and Nicolas are living in New York, launching Joko in the world's biggest consumer market. In 2020, in the middle of Covid, Xavier told me that Joko would ultimately expand to the US, which to be honest, I didn't believe, and I was wrong.

I wasn't alone in my skepticism. There are almost no examples of European consumer apps successfully cracking the American market — Spotify stands out as the rare success story — and the asymmetry is hard to ignore: if you look at any European's phone, the apps are overwhelmingly American: Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Instagram. The traffic rarely flows the other way.

By 2025, Joko was already a clear leader in France, generating strong cash flow and occupying a position of relative comfort that most founders would have been tempted to consolidate, or secretly prepare for an exit. Joko’s founders chose differently. Xavier and Nicolas packed up, moved to New York, and started again from zero without brand recognition, merchant relationships, or an existing user base, just the conviction that the model was strong enough to travel, and the ambition to find out. "In consumer," Xavier often says, "there is almost no ceiling." What they found on the other side was something unexpected: the raw excitement of speaking directly to users again, identifying bugs, rebuilding intuition in a market that had never heard of them. For Xavier, that discomfort is not a cost of the expansion, it is precisely the mindset he wants to bring back into Joko as it grows.

The early signals are promising. Joko has signed its first major US merchants like Nike, Sam's Club, T-Mobile, DoorDash, Walgreens, Lululemon and Expedia. User numbers are growing 30% every month, and retention in the early cohorts is already tracking ahead of where France was at the equivalent stage. The product is stronger than it was at the French launch, but the principles are unchanged: stay close to users, obsess over detail, move fast, and never mistake a comfortable position for a finished one.

Beyond cash back: how a world class engineering team is about to reshape shopping

The US expansion is only one part of the story. In parallel, Joko is making its most ambitious product bet yet: the official launch of Juno, an AI shopping assistant built on top of everything the company has steadfastly assembled over the past seven years.

The timing is deliberate. ChatGPT and Gemini are already positioning themselves in AI shopping, and they will certainly capture part of this trillion-dollar opportunity. But they are also discovering that shopping is hard and requires focus: OpenAI recently rolled back its shopping initiatives to concentrate on enterprise and coding. There is space for a vertical AI shopping leader, and Joko is ideally positioned to take that lead. Joko starts from a fundamentally different position. With 40,000 merchants onboard, 6 million users, and a proprietary database of more than 100 million standardized, real-time products, the company has spent years accumulating exactly the kind of structured, high-quality data that makes a shopping AI genuinely useful rather than merely plausible. Just as importantly, Joko knows its users: years of shopping and transaction data allow a level of personalization that no generalist assistant can match. Building and developing that infrastructure has been an extraordinary technical challenge, led by Alexandre and his team of world class engineers coming from companies like Google and Amazon. And it did not start with the AI wave: Joko began building its product catalogue years ago, for wish lists, price tracking, and price comparison, long before OpenAI or Gemini made their shopping ambitions public.

The result is something the large generalist models cannot easily replicate: a personalized shopping experience delivered in natural language, grounded in real product data and shaped by what Joko actually knows about each of its users. And because Joko focuses on shopping alone, it can go beyond conversation and build AI-powered experiences for every shopping journey, including those where natural language is not the right interface. Someone looking for a washing machine can get a recommendation calibrated to price, verified consumer feedback and technical specifications simultaneously. Someone shopping for a birthday gift can get inspiration that reflects not just what's popular, but what the person receiving it would actually want. Users who came to Joko for cash back will now find a reason to come back every time they consider a purchase — not only to collect a reward, but to make a better decision. That shift, from a destination for savings to a trusted companion for every spending moment, is what Juno is really about. Joko is about to completely reinvent the shopping experience, it won’t be incremental but a totally new value proposition for consumers all over the world.

Xavier, Nicolas and Alexandre set out to transform a moribund category, bringing to it the rigor, obsession with detail, and entrepreneurial passion that have defined them from the start, and in doing so, built a market leader where others had failed. After years of headwinds and moments of genuine uncertainty, Joko has the wind at its back. Known for having the highest talent density in Paris, the company has built a team of 100 people who don't just excel at their jobs but think and act like founders themselves: restless, accountable, and genuinely invested in where the company is going. It is with that collective mindset that Joko will keep pushing the boundaries of what a consumer company can be. The US expansion and the launch of Juno are still in their early chapters, but they will be pursued with the same discipline and the same relentless focus on users and merchants that got the company here. What has always set Joko apart, in the end, is their ability to bring employees, merchants and users together toward a common vision: to build a shopping experience that didn't exist before, and that nobody else was bold enough to attempt. That, from the beginning, was the contrarian bet.