It feels appropriate that Paris’ largest startup campus is 300 meters long – the same size as the Eiffel Tower. Built in an old freight train station, Station F is home to 1,000 early-stage startups. Glass-fronted meeting rooms reveal entrepreneurs huddled in conference rooms or putting on ring lights. Google, Apple and La French Tech, a government agency, all offer training and advice here from their internal offices. Station F embodies the success of the support network France has built around its startups, which are now starting to attract significant funding.
In the first three months of the year, France raised $5.4 billion (about €5.3 billion) in VC funding, double the amount raised in the same period last year. There has always been technical talent in Paris, says Clara Chappaz, director of La French Tech. “The ecosystem is really accelerating now and we have the resources to go much further, to really nurture this talent,” she says.
Township
When Tara Heuzé-Sarmini was invited for an interview at a co-living company targeting professionals in Germany, she realized this. “I didn’t want to do co-living for yuppies who work in tech in Berlin,” she says. “I wanted to make a little more impact.” Instead, Heuzé-Sarmini and her co-founder Ruben launched Petri Commune, a Paris-based startup that applies the idea of cohabitation to single parents with young children. One in four French families lives in a single-parent family. Even so, the country’s housing is still geared towards couples, meaning they often have to move into cramped one-bed apartments to cut costs. Commune, launched in 2021 and raising €1.5 million (or about $1.5 million) in seed funding the following year, plans to offer recently divorced parents the privacy of their own self-contained apartment coupled with the community of a communal kitchen and games room . Their first location in Paris, a former hotel, will accommodate 22 families and is expected to open in early 2023. city Hall
Scott Gordon and Amine Bounjou, founders of fintech startup Kard.Photo: Julien Faure and Marina Zagortseva
cardo
Paris is full of fintechs. But Amine Bounjou and Scott Gordon think they’ve found a gap in the market: the French under-18s without a bank account. Their company, Kard, offers a bank account with two separate apps: one for kids and one for their parents. Kids use their Kard account to spend pocket money or get paid for selling clothes online, while parents use the app to set spending limits and understand their kids’ shopping habits. So far, 85,000 teens and preteens have been tempted to join in due to Kard’s meme-heavy Instagram presence and his shiny metallic cards. But Kard doesn’t want to be a kid’s bank forever, and their path to becoming a retail bank depends on one bright idea: “People don’t leave their first bank,” Gordon says. The startup has raised a total of €10 million since its launch in 2019, with BlaBlaCar co-founder Francis Nappez as one of the investors. kard.eu
offishall
When the pandemic first invaded Italy, Audrey Barbier-Litvak ran WeWork offices in Southern Europe. Her team’s job was to understand how many people still wanted to work from the company’s coworking space in Milan. “It was a nightmare,” she says, describing the spreadsheet they used to track 1,000 people. That experience inspired Offishall, a hybrid work planning tool that Barbier-Litvak launched in 2020 with co-founders Pierre Godret and Bruno Ronzani. The pandemic created the freedom to choose where you want to work, but this new freedom has to be organised, she says. Users tell Offishall when they work from home and when they travel to the office, and use the software to see who else is in the office on different days. That data could also help Offishall’s clients, such as the world’s largest luxury group LVMH, understand their team’s patterns as they downsize or remodel their office. The company raised €1.2 million in August 2021. offishall.io
Omie & Cie
Christian Jorge has already proven that he can make a startup a success. He was one of the co-founders of the second-hand fashion site Vestiaire Collective, which was valued at $1.7 billion last year. In partnership with co-founders Joséphine Bournonville, Coline Burland and Benoit Del Basso, his next venture is tackling the climate crisis by focusing on food, not clothing. Launched in 2021, Omie & Cie aims to revolutionize online grocery shopping with transparency. Every Omnie product, from ketchup to eggs, is accompanied by an overview of where the ingredients come from, how the profits are distributed and any packaging waste. The company says 5,000 families use its site to buy all their groceries. It has raised €4 million so far, with French chef Thierry Marx as one of the investors. omie.fr
green
Greenly wants to make carbon accounting more accessible, says Alexis Normand, who co-founded the company in 2019 with Matthieu Vegreville and Arnaud Delubac. Most of the startup’s business comes from helping SMEs calculate how much carbon they can save by switching to greener data centers or buying more eco-friendly laptops. About 60,000 people have also downloaded the company’s app, which analyzes a user’s bank account to estimate emissions associated with transactions at gas stations or supermarkets. Greenly’s technology is already integrated into the banking app of French banking group BNP Paribas, and in April 2022, the company raised €21.5 million as part of its Series A. greenly.earth
Lemur
In less than a year, Parisian startup Maki has built an HR platform that aims to replace resumes with gamified online tests designed to make the hiring process more efficient and fair. Launched in November 2021, Maki’s three co-founders, Maxime Legardez, Paul-Louis Caylar and Benjamin Chino, have engaged 220 companies to use their platform so far, including McDonald’s in France. Maki’s platform provides tests that assess candidates’ personalities, cognitive abilities, how comfortable they are with tools such as Excel, and their soft skills, such as their ability to give and receive feedback. To date, the company has received €11 million in funding. makipeople.com
Heuzé-Sarmini and its co-founder of the municipality, Ruben Petri.Photo: Julien Faure and Marina Zagortseva
Kinetix technology
Virtual reality avatars can generally walk and run, but they can’t perform custom TikTok moves or copy soccer players’ victory dances. Yassine Tahi and fellow gamer Henri Mirande think that’s a problem; they wanted to give people the opportunity to express themselves in VR and future iterations of the metaverse. So in 2020, the duo founded Kinetix Tech, a platform that allows their user base of 25,000 people to convert videos of themselves into animated avatars that can be imported into virtual worlds like Roblox without any 3D animation experience. The startup raised $11 million in seed funding in May, with virtual worlds The Sandbox and ZEPETO joining the round. kinetix.tech
Homa games
When Netflix came out squid game, gamers wanted to play games that share the storyline of the hit TV series, says Daniel Nathan, who launched Homa Games in 2019 with co-founder Olivier Le Bas. The company is a game publisher that gives independent developers free tools so they can quickly create and distribute their ideas fast enough to respond to pop culture moments. Developers can use Homa Games to see what’s trending and also access the company’s advertising technology to monetize their games. To date, games created on the Homa platform have been installed nearly a billion times and the company has raised $65 million from investors including the founders of King, the company behind Candy Crush. homgames.com
To jump
In an effort to eliminate the drawbacks of self-employment, Nioclas Fayon, Thibault Coulon and Maxime Bouchet launched Jump in 2021. In exchange for a monthly fee of €79 or €99, the startup hires freelancers and gig workers on long-term contracts; Jump freelancers are then paid into their Jump bank account and the company takes over the management of their taxes and pension. If a customer pays late, Jump can offer an advance or take care of applying for a loan or mortgage. The company raised €4 million in a 2021 funding round led by Deliveroo and Revolut investor Index Ventures. join-jump.com
pigment
Pigment is the Parisian startup trying to take over Excel. The company was founded in 2019 on the belief that companies do not have the tools they need to visualize business data and perform financial planning. Instead, they’re resorting to Excel because newer tools just don’t offer the same flexibility, says Regina Croda, head of marketing at Pigment. That’s why the co-founders of Pigment, Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli, have created a new tool that they describe as more intuitive and easy to use, which also promotes collaboration. For example, colleagues can comment on each other in spreadsheet cells. The company counts Deliveroo and Blabla Car among its customers and has raised more than $100 million to date. gopigment.com
