Salma Bakouk

Salma Bakouk is co-founder and CEO of Sifflet, a data observability company in Paris, France, that watches data for errors and traces them through lineage to the reports they affect. “In French, Sifflet means ‘Whistle,’ which represents the alerting aspect of our product,” she said on the Datacast podcast.

From Paris to a Hong Kong trading desk

Born in Morocco and raised in Paris, she studied applied mathematics at École Centrale Paris and statistics at Paris Dauphine. “Right after graduating from college in France, I was offered a job in Hong Kong,” she said. “Since I had never been to Hong Kong, it was a complete adventure.” She moved there in 2015 and spent about five years in investment banking on an equity trading desk.

Starting with lineage

She started Sifflet in 2021 with brothers Wissem Fathallah, now chief product officer, and Wajdi Fathallah, chief technology officer. “I could never be a solo founder,” she said, adding that the personal relationship lets the three of them voice doubts “without questioning each other's commitment to what we are building together.”

The product began with lineage, not alerts. “The very first lines of code we wrote were to build a lineage solution,” she said. “We wanted to create that connection between data engineers and data consumers and provide context to the anomalies detected by the tool.”