Yessica Klein
8 min read
09 November 2025
Véronique Pevtschin is helping to silently revolutionize the film industry. She came into the film industry from a different perspective than most: cybersecurity. After studying in Compiègne and Brussels and then at MIT, Véronique worked in everything from public policy at the European Commission to investment analysis for a Brussels-based public fund. Eventually, she ended up working on security research at a cybersecurity lab. These roles gave her a keen sense for how to make technology work for individuals and society while avoiding the red tape that can slow down progress.
She was already thinking about how she could use her skills as a researcher to help effect positive change in other industries when future cofounders Max and Thierry Hermans and Nathalie Idiart introduced her to a project that would help make the film industry less wasteful. She knew it was the perfect challenge. The industry employs 30 million people and is responsible for roughly 1% of all global CO2 emissions. By simplifying ecoproduction and reducing the carbon footprint of creative projects, their solutions could make a real impact. TheGreenShot launched at the 2021 Cannes film festival and now employs staff across 11 hubs in North America and Europe. The company’s aim is that by 2030, the environmental standards it is supporting in film productions will be the norm.
What inspired your initial decision to link up with the other GreenShot founders?
I'm actually an engineer, and I worked for 15 years in cybersecurity, so fairly far removed from this world. But what I really like is digitizing badly digitized work in whatever industry. TheGreenShot was fairly unique in that it combined that with something else I was interested in, which was sustainability. I live in a part of the world – Puglia, Italy – that's been very hard hit by an olive-tree disease that destroyed the economy. Whether it relates or not to climate change, that's not 100% sure, but that's how I began feeling first-hand that something is going wrong in nature.
When you started TheGreenShot, what problem were you responding to?
The initial idea came from Max, three years before actually launching the company. He saw a very straightforward pain point. Max was managing huge budgets on international co-productions where a lot of people who are used to working in their own environment – makeup, costume sets and so on – must come together. It's a bit like nine SMEs working together and spending a lot of money that they are not in control of. So the initial pain point was: how to get a hold on finances, decrease financial risks and ensure that a movie actually comes to a final production? And so he solved a very key pain point, which is real-time visibility on finance. We realized that we could bring the same level of detail to carbon footprints.
How has the mission and values of the organization evolved in the past four to five years?
The values haven't evolved because from the start, our mission was to accelerate the move for productions in the entertainment world toward more sustainable processes and make it attractive for them. The mission itself hasn't changed. What has evolved, I think, is the way we deploy it. Initially we had this idea of a one-stop shop. We’d go to a client, do incredibly interesting demos and get people super excited, but then they wouldn’t buy the product. That's what we lived through in the first six months. So we decided to go modular: the client has one pain point, and we just fix that one, and then we build up client value over time.
“I love deploying tech, but the key thing for me was the size of the industry, and it was actually much larger than I anticipated. It was international. For me, being in a single country was something that I wouldn't go for.”
How has your team evolved?
We started in Brussels with three founders. There was Max, the inventor; Thierry, the CTO; and I was the third founder. We were ready to launch in March 2020 when basically the world shut down. That was the first interesting resilience test. Instead, we launched in 2021 at Cannes, which was in July. In 2022, we expanded in France, and then we merged with a French company and acquired a US company in 2024. Contrary to many startups, we grew very, very quickly. We are now 55 people in 11 different locations across Europe and North America. That's not what a startup usually does. In many cases, startups are told to grow in your home base, get whatever highest percentage of the market and then expand. In our case, probably because of our industry, it just doesn't make sense.
What is your take on the startup ecosystem in Europe right now?
I would say four or five years ago you could have an idea, get it funded quite easily and do several specific steps with the money you raised. That's becoming increasingly difficult. Startups today need a different level of maturity – an idea is just not enough. You need something really convincing that has already taken a first step to maturity. Either it's the big client win, the big something, but it needs to be there. I believe there's a lot of pressure and a lack of understanding in terms of when and why startups need funding, and what is operational money and what is growth money.
What has been the importance for you of being based in Brussels?
Belgium is a very complex country. Not only do we have a certain lack of government, but we also live in a very multicultural environment. We have different regulations 20 kilometers from Brussels. I think it's a very good laboratory for complexity. It's a very small country but it's very vibrant in terms of production. We are also supported by public funds, and Brussels as a city has deployed a real ecosystem to support startups.
“There are a lot of myths around how to create a startup. There's sometimes an undervaluation of how many hours of work you're going to put into it and the level of risk you're taking.”