Anicet Nougaret is the Founder and CEO of Boat, a Y Combinator Fall 2026-backed startup building the best cloud VMs for billions of AI agents, based in Paris, France.

Anicet studied Computer Science Engineering at INSA Lyon and completed an Erasmus semester in Artificial Intelligence at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, before interning at the European Space Agency working on black hole detection using data science.

A prolific builder since 2016, Anicet authored an open-source deep learning framework in Rust, won a 1,000 euro hackathon prize for an ethical fake news platform, and has been active in game development and fullstack engineering.

Prior to Boat, Anicet co-founded Ascii (also known as ariana.dev), a time-travel debugger for JS, TypeScript, and Python, and participated in the Entrepreneur First residency program, sharpening his focus on AI infrastructure.

Boat provides per-second-billed Ubuntu VMs at industry-leading low prices, targeting the emerging agentic computing market where AI agents require always-on, scalable cloud computers for tasks ranging from coding to legal research and auditing.