A former student at the École normale supérieure, Henri Verdier was founder and CEO of Odile Jacob Multimédia. In 2007, he joined Lagardère Active as Director of Innovation. In 2009, he joined the Institut Télécom as Director of Foresight, in charge of creating the "Futur numérique" Think Tank (Fondation- telecom). He then co-founded, with Jean-Michel Lasry, Pierre-Louis Lions and Olivier Guéant, MFG-Labs, which he left in 2012 and which was acquired by Havas Media in May 2013.
A founding member of the Cap Digital competitiveness cluster, he served as Vice-Chairman from 2006 to 2008, before being elected Chairman of the Board from 2008 to January 2013. In January 2013, he became head of Etalab, the mission responsible for opening up public data under the authority of the Prime Minister. Under his direction, Etalab is developing a new version, inaugurated on December 18, 2013, of the French open data portal "data.gouv.fr", which hosts a wealth of public data and is the first open data portal in the world to welcome citizen data and reuse.
Henri Verdier is also a member of the scientific council of the Institut Mines-Télécom, as well as the ARCEP foresight committee and the CNIL foresight committee. On September 19, 2014, he was appointed General Data Administrator by the French government. A year later, on September 23, 2015, Henri Verdier was appointed, by the Council of Ministers, interministerial director of the State's digital, information and communication system (DINSIC). On November 15, 2018, he was appointed by the Council of Ministers as Ambassador for the Digital Sector.
