An authentic French family company, built to help protectors see clearly

Aeteos was founded in 2016 by cognitive psychologists Mark and Béatrice Pohlmann. We develop Percipion™, a sovereign symbolic cognitive platform for sensitive text, used by law enforcement, defence, forensics and organisations that cannot hand their data to someone else’s model.

The rule has not changed since the beginning: the machine assists the human. It does not replace them.

Aeteos remains independent and family-owned. The software is designed in France, to run on the customer’s premises, with a small energy footprint and without a hidden model API.

Percipion : it started with how people understand language

Béatrice and Mark trained as cognitive psychologists in Paris in the early 1990s. They also wrote software. In 1994 they founded Beamak (Béatrice and Mark) an association that built open-source tools and distributed them through the specialist press.

In 1996 Beamak developed a database that could ingest unstructured natural language and search it in an everyday way, using an advanced algorithm with fuzzy logic. In 1997 that work was used to simulate dialogue on Minitel services. They later worked with the CNRS and the LAFORIA artificial intelligence laboratory.

They then spent more than twenty years in digital transformation for major European organisations, including groups such as Airbus and Thales, inside firms such as Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), Capgemini and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

That path matters for one reason. They saw, from inside real operations, that people still had to read, interpret and judge text by hand, and that the new wave of statistical AI was becoming more powerful while becoming less understandable.

Founded to reproduce understanding, not to imitate it

Most language tools match patterns or predict the next token. They do not grasp intent, context or weak signals the way an analyst does. After years at the join of psychology and computing, Mark and Béatrice took that as a design brief, not a slogan.

In 2016 they founded Aeteos as a French family-owned company dedicated to third-generation symbolic cognitive computing. From neuroscience, cognitive psychology, philosophy and linguistics they built Percipion: explainable, sovereign, meant to help the people who help others.

Percipion was first used in the enterprise. That chapter is closed as a commercial focus. It taught the team how to put the engine in real organisations. It is not who you come to now.

From enterprise software to those who protect others

In 2023 the association IWAS asked whether Percipion could help in the fight against crimes against children. The platform was adapted for that work. The centre of gravity of the company moved with it: serious crime, digital threats, protection of the most vulnerable.

The public commitments around that turn include:

• Mark’s presidency of Point de Contact, a French NGO against cyber violence
• Mark’s service as Lieutenant Colonel in the Gendarmerie nationale cyber reserve
• Joint research, with Béatrice, on pedocriminal strategies at the Gendarmerie’s research centre
• Participation in coalitions such as ChildSafetyOn

By the end of 2025 Aeteos dedicated the company to a sovereign threat-intelligence platform for law enforcement, defence, forensics and critical organisations.

The team behind Percipion

A small multidisciplinary team: cognitive science, psychology, knowledge engineering and software.

Work with us

If you want a briefing, an evaluation on your own infrastructure, or a conversation about a specific mission set, write to us.

We do not put a public form on this page. One mailbox, handled by the team.