Bio
David Chevalier is the co-founder and CEO of Surfe, a connected revenue workspace headquartered in Paris with offices in Barcelona and New York. Chevalier, who is German despite holding a French name, co-founded the company alongside a French co-founder, and the pair deliberately built the business in English from day one, viewing it as an international company from the outset. He describes his background as that of a bootstrap founder who learned to scale through founder-led sales before transitioning to a repeatable sales motion. Chevalier bootstrapped Surfe for its first two years before raising outside capital, taking no secondary liquidity for himself across any of the funding rounds to date. He has noted that the absence of secondaries is common among European investors, though he has acknowledged that taking some personal liquidity may make sense at a future stage. Prior to the current funding structure, he and his co-founder grew the business entirely through product-led growth and CRM marketplace partnerships before hiring a sales team. Chevalier co-founded Surfe, originally called LeadJet, in 2020, launching first as a Chrome extension that connected CRMs with LinkedIn. The company reached $1 million ARR within one and a half years, grew to $4.5 million ARR by end of 2024, $9 million ARR by end of 2025, and approximately $15 million ARR by mid-2026, roughly doubling year over year. Surfe has raised under $10 million in total across a seed round of roughly $5 million and a pre-Series A expansion of another $5 million. The company serves more than 10,000 paying customers across 50,000 users, counts Google and Elastic as enterprise clients, has at least one customer paying over $1 million per year, and operates a team of approximately 70 people with 20 in sales. Approximately 40 percent of revenue comes from the United States.