About StartClaims
StartClaims is a company founded around a simple idea: a claim should not be an opaque bundle of documents and arguments. It should be possible to represent a claim as a structured, inspectable chain connecting evidence, facts, rules, calculations, proofs, and conclusions.
We bring ideas and methods from Lean — the interactive theorem prover and programming language used for formal mathematics and software verification — into the claims process. In Lean, a proof is not accepted because it sounds plausible; a small trusted kernel checks whether it follows from the stated assumptions. We borrow that culture of explicit assumptions, compositional reasoning, machine checking, provenance, and reproducibility, and apply it to claims: legal claims, insurance claims, employment claims, consumer claims, data-rights claims, scientific credit claims, and other structured assertions of entitlement or priority. We also process Lean mathematical proofs when scientific controversies depend on what has actually been established from explicit assumptions.
StartClaims is not a law firm, and does not replace lawyers, judges, adjusters, experts, or human judgment. Our role is to make claims more structured, auditable, reproducible, and scalable.
Why we exist
Legal settlements, insurance policies, employment disputes, and compensation schemes all reduce, in the end, to a chain of reasoning: what happened, what rule applies, and what follows. That reasoning is usually reconstructed by hand, under deadline pressure, scattered across spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, and tacit professional knowledge that nobody has time to fully audit. We think the people depending on that reasoning — claimants, administrators, courts, and regulators — deserve better than "we ran some test cases."
Our team pairs formal-methods engineers with the people who understand claimant reality, settlement wording, policy language, and statutory formulas, and encodes those rules as explicit, checkable specifications. The result is a claims process whose reasoning can be inspected by anyone, not just trusted on faith.
Founders
Paul-Olivier Dehaye
Mathematician and founder of Hestia.ai and PersonalData.IO. Paul-Olivier works at the intersection of data rights, algorithmic accountability, and formal reasoning. He was an early investigator of Cambridge Analytica and the data systems around it, and has spent years reverse-engineering data ecosystems and helping individuals obtain and analyze their own data — including tools and research on algorithmic management and the economics of platform work. His investigations and tools have helped turn individual data access into collective evidence.
At StartClaims, Paul-Olivier's role centers on formalization, data and evidence infrastructure, algorithms, mathematical verification, and scalable claim construction: can the reasoning and evidence be represented precisely enough to compute with it?
Brahim Ben Ali
VTC driver and trade-union organizer with extensive practical experience representing platform workers. Brahim is Secretary General and legal representative of FO INV / Intersyndicale Nationale VTC, a French union representing platform workers including VTC drivers, which grew out of the earlier UVH/INV organizing efforts he led from a regional structure into a national organization. He has represented drivers in negotiations, regulatory work, and disputes with platforms, testified before the French National Assembly on platform work and account deactivations, and worked within wider European and international networks of app-based transport workers to build driver-controlled alternatives.
At StartClaims, Brahim's role centers on claimant reality, collective organization, case intake, and evidence from the field: can an actual claimant obtain the evidence, understand the process, survive the friction, and get a remedy?
StartClaims exists at the meeting of those two questions. If you are administering a claims programme, organizing claimants, or want a claims process that can withstand scrutiny, get in touch.
Boundaries
StartClaims provides technology and claim-structuring services. Legal, insurance, and other regulated professional services are provided only where expressly stated and, where required, through appropriately authorized professionals. We do not guarantee recovery, determine insurance coverage, or decide factual disputes.