The story of Teralab is not a story of Nexedi. Teralab has been created by business developers and engineers of Institut Mines Telecom since 2012: Pierre Pleven, Philippe Letellier, Anne-Sophie Taillandier, Olivier Dehoux, Gilles Polart-Donat and many others which I am not aware of. I appologize for not mentioning their name here.
In 2012, French large corporations and government agencies were looking for a platform that could be used to start implementing Big Data and AI algorithms. However, they did not trust private sector to keep of copy of their most secret data. Therefore, they did not want to rely on companies such as Amazon or OVH.
Those French large corporations and government agencies did not either have access to sufficient internal IT resources. Most datacenters of large corporations were optimised for business applications, not for big data.
Last, they did not even have data scientists among their staff.
They were thus looking for a solution to start big data and AI experiments, in a secure way, without infrastructure and without data scientists.