Romain Lacombe

Founder & CEO, Plume Labs

Romain Lacombe is the founder & CEO of Plume Labs, a startup building tools to inform citizens of what they breathe and empower communities to beat air pollution.

A Transparency Engineer who’s trying to change the world, one kilobyte of data at a time, Romain is a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur, French public servant, World Bank consultant, MIT environmental economics research assistant, Fulbright scholar and mathematics student, and a fierce advocate of the power of openness who spent the past five years building Open Data policies to make governments more accountable, in France and around the world. 

From 2011 to 2014, he was the co-founder and head of innovation of Etalab (data.gouv.fr), the French Prime Minister’s task force for access to information which he helped create in 2011 after authoring the first report on Open Data’s potential for France. At task force Etalab, Romain focused on policy delivery, startups outreach and international relations, representing his country in the G8 Open Data Charter negotiations and coordinating France’s recent adhesion to the Open Government Partnership. 

Romain is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique (France) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a recipient of the MIT Technology Review ‘Innovators Under 35 France’ 2015 Award. His work has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, the BBC, ABC News, France 24 and the Associated Press.