Our Team
Unitedby horses.
The founders of Smart Horse Labs.
Francesca Hazan
Co-Founder, CEO & Head of Equine Performance
How did it start?
Francesca’s story has always been written alongside horses. She brings more than 26 years of experience in the equestrian world, with a diverse skill set spanning international showjumping, training, rehabilitation, equine physiotherapy and breeding her own warmbloods. Today, as the owner of a high-performance equestrian centre in France, she remains immersed in the realities of breeding, training, competition, rehabilitation, stable management and daily equine care.
What fizzes your blood?
Finding the point where welfare and performance become one and the same. Francesca’s passion lies in bringing together anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, medicine, training and rehabilitation to understand what each individual horse needs — not simply to recover from injury, but to become stronger, healthier and better prepared for the future.
What do you bring?
At Smart Horse Labs, Francesca is the practical force behind every project. She asks the questions that matter: Will this genuinely improve the horse’s life? Will it work in a real stable? Will it help the people responsible for putting it into practice? An idea may be ingenious, but it does not leave the drawing board unless it can survive the realities of horses, riders, owners, trainers and grooms.
Why get up?
Quite literally, the horses. Every morning brings another opportunity to help a horse become healthier, stronger, more confident or better understood. That is more than enough reason for Francesca to get up and begin again.
What’s the quirk?
Francesca may be the CEO, but the horses remain senior management. They set the working hours, disregard the business plan and are remarkably direct when breakfast is late.
What do you believe?
If it’s good for the horse — it will be good for the sport.
One word?
Grounded.
Jenku Dietrichsen
Co-Founder, Chief Innovation Officer & Head of Behavioural Systems
How did it start?
Jenku has spent more than 35 years asking a question that has shaped his work as a farrier, trainer, coach and equine behaviour specialist: Why? He has never accepted “because that is how it has always been done” as a satisfactory answer — especially when the system makes sense to humans but not to the horse.
What fizzes your blood?
Discovering a problem hiding in plain sight. A behaviour others dismiss, a routine nobody has questioned or a gap between what a horse is communicating and what a human understands can occupy Jenku’s mind for hours. Where other people see an inconvenience, he sees an invitation to think again.
What do you bring?
Jenku’s curiosity moves naturally between equine learning theory, incentive-based training, behavioural science, artificial intelligence, environmental design, data and systems engineering. To him, these are not separate subjects. They are different tools serving the same purpose: understanding the horse more clearly and building better systems around them.
At Smart Horse Labs, Jenku turns observations into questions, questions into experiments and experiments into practical solutions.
Why get up?
The possibility that something accepted as normal could be understood differently — and improved — by the end of the day. For Jenku, an unanswered question is not a frustration. It is an open door.
What’s the quirk?
Jenku rarely sees an ordinary stable problem. Show him a manure bucket and he may see a training opportunity, a waste-management system and a research project. Give him a simple question before breakfast and, by lunchtime, he may already have mapped out the next three to six months of innovation.
What do you believe?
“If we can measure it, we can understand it. If we can understand it, we can improve it.”
One word?
Curious.
Bettertogether.
Two perspectives. One mission.
Francesca starts with the horse and asks: Will this work in the real world? Jenku starts with the system and asks: Why does it have to work this way at all?
She grounds innovation in reality. He pushes reality to evolve. She ensures ideas survive the stable. He ensures the stable itself is worth questioning.
Somewhere between those two forces, Smart Horse Labs was born.
Because horses have already adapted to our world long enough. Now it is our turn to adapt to theirs.