Sylvain Perron

Sylvain Perron is co-founder and chief executive of Botpress, a Canadian company whose open-source platform lets developers build chatbots and AI agents. He grew up in Dolbeau, a town of about 10,000 people in northern Quebec, taught himself to program as a child, and left university to work as a developer.

Childhood in Dolbeau, Quebec

He got his first computer at 10 and found a programming book in his elementary school library. “By fourth grade I was writing my own code in C++,” he said in a founder Q&A with Decibel. “Computer science was one of the only ways to find a career outside of my small town.” He went to Quebec City, Quebec, to study engineering at Université Laval, and in his third year read that Google would no longer require degrees for programming jobs. “I had a significant amount of debt and dropped out immediately,” he said.

Chief Technology Officer at Protorisk

He moved to London, England, to join Protorisk, a financial services software company, and became its chief technology officer two years later, according to Le Soleil. Its risk tool for bankers had a complex interface, and its users kept sending the same technical questions. “If the analyst can ask a question in just a few sentences … shouldn’t I be able to build an application that can translate their words into actions?” he recalled thinking. He started Botpress with his boss at the time, whom BetaKit identifies as co-founder Justin Watson, and released the code as open source.

Within days thousands of people were sending feedback and contributions. The first large company to call offered $10,000 for support. “As it turned out, the lawyer fee for just helping us read the contract was more than $10,000, so the deal wasn’t profitable,” Perron said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Botpress helped the Quebec government answer residents’ questions about the disease.

Betting on Conversation at Botpress

Perron argues that most software forces everyone through the same rigid set of screens. “Giving people freedom to speak with any application will make software feel highly personalized for each person,” he told Decibel. “Conversation is the ultimate UI.” According to BetaKit, Botpress raised a $25 million Series B in 2025 to build what it calls the infrastructure layer for AI agents.