David Chevalier

David Maurice Chevalier is co-founder and chief executive of Surfe, a sales data company in Paris, France, that enriches contacts with emails and phone numbers and syncs them to CRMs. He founded it in 2020 as Leadjet with Romain Ginestou, who serves as chief technology officer.

Leaving Finance for HEC Paris

Chevalier spent about five years in mergers and acquisitions and leveraged finance before leaving to study at HEC Paris in a deep-tech entrepreneurship track, according to a YesPress profile. He then went to UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar in its Learn2Launch program.

Meeting Romain Ginestou at UC Berkeley

At UC Berkeley he met Ginestou. Both used LinkedIn constantly to find people and disliked copying every contact back into a CRM by hand, so they built a small browser tool to do it for them. They expected only about twenty people to use it.

Launching Leadjet During the Shift to Remote Selling

Leadjet launched as sales teams moved to remote work, and a Product Hunt launch brought its first wave of users. It began as an extension that moved contacts from LinkedIn into HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Copper, and the company later rebranded as Surfe, according to Station F. "We want sales teams to feel the same unity and togetherness when using our platform," Chevalier said of the new name.

Growing Through CRM Marketplaces and an API

Surfe's first growth came from ranking at the top of the HubSpot and Pipedrive app marketplaces, before it had a sales team. It built a waterfall enrichment API, first for Google, and Chevalier told Nathan Latka in 2026 that API, credit, and MCP usage made up about a third of revenue, with offices in Paris, Barcelona, and New York.