Claire Gouze
| Claire Gouze | |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, CEO |
|---|---|
| Known for | Co-founder and CEO of Nao Labs |
| Education | ESSEC Business School |
Claire Gouze is a French entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Nao Labs, a company developing an open-source analytics agent built for context engineering. Nao Labs was part of the Y Combinator X25 batch.[1]
Career
Before founding Nao Labs, Gouze worked as a data scientist at Boston Consulting Group (BCG). She subsequently served as Head of Data at Sunday, a restaurant technology company.[2] She holds a degree from ESSEC Business School, where she focused on Strategic Business Analytics.[3]
Nao Labs develops an open-source analytics agent that allows users to build and manage AI agent context as a file system. The product enables organizations to deploy a chat-based interface through which both technical and non-technical users can run analytics queries against their data. The platform supports integration with data warehouses including PostgreSQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, and DuckDB, as well as tools such as dbt and Looker. The company's core thesis is that AI agent reliability depends on the quality and structure of the context provided to the agent, and Nao's tooling is designed to let data teams engineer that context systematically.[4]
Gouze has written publicly about the state of analytics agents, publishing a benchmark in January 2026 in which she evaluated 14 analytics agent products. She has also advocated for the concept of data teams evolving into "context teams" as AI-driven analytics tools become more prevalent.[5]
Gouze was selected for the Station F Female Founders Fellowship. She has spoken publicly about increasing the representation of women in technology and in Y Combinator, noting that approximately 25 women were among roughly 300 participants in her YC batch. She presented Nao Labs at the AI Launchpad 2025 session of the Data Council conference.
References
- ↑ "A woman founder's guide to get into Y Combinator". 'New AI Order (Substack)}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Claire Gouze – Co-Founder & CEO, Nao". 'Huge Magazine}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Claire Gouze – Speaker Profile". 'Huge Magazine}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Nao – The Analytics Agent Built for Context Engineering". 'Nao Labs}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "I tested 14 analytics agents – so you don't have to". 'New AI Order (Substack)}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.