Too many founders from overseas treat America as one market, reuse the same messaging as they’ve had success with at ‘home’ or hire too early. For Karim Jouini, it isn’t trying to decide whether the country matters, he knows it does. His questions are where and how are the best ways to break into the largest market in the world.
For the company he is now building, he says the United States is half his potential market. If you sell software to IT teams, as he is trying to do, you do not tend to shrug at that kind of number.
And it's a question that runs through almost everything he says about building in North America right now.
It goes without saying that the U.S. holds enormous potential for the kind of software company he is building with Thunders, an Agentic AI solution for user testing. But entering a market is not the same as belonging in it. When we spoke together on a call earlier this year, he talked about discovering that America has its own invisible filters that founders from outside the country should keep aware of: a premium attached to being “made in the US,” a sense that potential suppliers are sorted into two categories — American and not American — as well as the pressure to reshape yourself accordingly.
Jouini’s opinion on building a company is worth listening to. He’s already successfully exited; his previous company Expensya, was sold in 2023 to PE-backed Medius for more than $100 million. Since then, he’s become one of the most prolific angel investors in France, including a recent cheque as part of the $1.03 billion invested in AMI Labs, the largest ever seed round in Europe.
Jouini hails from Tunisia, a fact that adds to his plethora of achievements by virtue of the Expensya sale, as it is the second-largest exit in that country’s startup history. As a business though, Expensya was decidedly and intentionally pan-European. Their first market was France, then Spain, followed by Germany and the rest of the continent. In this way, they were able to solve cross-border European issues for expenses regulation. But it also meant they came to other markets - including the US - later than many may have advised.
With Thunders, he says they’re targeting the US early as well as focusing more on marketing at the earliest stage for that same reason. He’s been spending more time in the U.S. than he ever has before: meeting with founders, investors, and ecosystem leaders while exploring where to deepen relationships, invest, and potentially expand the Thunders footprint.
Thunders helps product, QA, engineering, and delivery teams create and run user acceptance tests in natural language, without relying on heavy scripting. It has pre-trained AI test agents that are designed to write, execute, monitor, debug, and improve tests, helping organizations accelerate release cycles, reduce testing costs and maintenance, and broaden testing participation beyond engineering teams to include product managers, business analysts, and other functional leaders.They’re already seeing traction with notable European customers including Cegid, Sopra Steria, SNCF, Allianz, and LegalPlace.
But in the U.S., he’s still working on validating the market.
Like plenty of founders building software outside the U.S., he assumed the path ran through California. It had to be the Bay Area, or at least that was the map in his head: software meant San Francisco, and San Francisco means proximity to customers, capital, talent and legitimacy.
Like any good entrepreneur, his goal is to talk with as many potential customers as soon as possible. Not to sell, but to understand. He says the customer conversations have started to complicate the path to market in the US.
One serious lead is in Atlanta. Another points toward Chicago. Soon he’ll make a visit to Detroit. The deeper he gets into the various markets across the country, the less convincing his old script is becoming. His customers, he has begun to realize, are not sitting in one shiny coastal cluster waiting to be discovered. They are scattered across a much larger, more distributed country than any he has broken into previously. One that seems to be the same, or similar, but is in fact more varied even than Europe with its languages, culture and food.
For these reasons, the problem is not simply breaking into America: the country has always the country and know where to focus your efforts.
This is partly a business story. But it is also a story about what foreign founders are told America requires of them, what actually turns out to be useful, and what they may have to give up if they follow the default path too obediently. This is about the assumptions built into the market: where companies are supposed to be, what kinds of founders are easiest to trust, and why so many smart people still confuse “building in America” with “moving to the coast.” But America is not one place. And founders who arrive believing otherwise may be starting with the wrong place altogether.
Sometimes that pressure is subtle. Sometimes it is not.
Karim describes realizing his “San Francisco idea” was likely wrong because the customers weren’t concentrated there; they were “everywhere in North America.” Instead of doubling down on the myth, he has shifted to do more discovery and set up based on where operating the business is simplest, not where the story sounds best. That naturally leads into his next operating decision: if the market is distributed, then where should they place a North American HQ? Time zones, travel and customer proximity are all part of the consideration and that he believes he needs to make a decision “this year,” with a clear emphasis on what will let the team operate effectively.
The next choices to be made are about how to enter the market without overcommitting too early. Karim is explicit that you can’t be successful in the U.S. without senior leadership on the ground — not a symbolic presence, but one of the leaders moving (or at least being structurally “there”). At the same time, he doesn’t pretend the only path is an immediate, permanent relocation with a fully built U.S. org. He sketches a more realistic intermediate step: a “soft landing” approach where a ready-made U.S. layer (sales / field marketing / execution) runs alongside the core team for 12–18 months — effectively “we will be your American team” — until the company is truly operating locally. Taken together, those choices make for a solid playbook: leadership-level commitment, plus an operational bridge that reduces the risk of either rushing or stalling.
The most interesting thing Karim says, in the end, is not a tidy moral about grit or risk-taking. It’s a market gap. He wishes he had access to a temporary U.S. operating layer that foreign founders can plug into while they learn the terrain and decide what “local” should actually look like. And, if more founders are going to build in America without blindly copying the default script, the next question isn’t just where should I move? It’s who builds the bridge that makes the move survivable — and what would a real soft landing need to include to turn learning into durable traction?
Karim Jouini is a Franco-Tunisian entrepreneur who was recently named among the top five angel investors in France. He previously built and exited Expensya, often referred to as the “Expensify of Europe,” in a successful $120M+ exit to PE-backed Medius. He is now building Thunders, an agentic AI platform for software testing and has been spending more time in the U.S. meeting with founders, investors, and ecosystem leaders as he explores where to deepen relationships, invest, and potentially expand the company’s footprint.
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