Over the past two years, the French capital has been in the grip of AI fever and has launched some of Europe's most high-profile startups, including Mistral, which is currently valued at $6.2 billion. This is partly due to the support the sector has received. President Emmanuel Macron has given French AI startups strong political support, while telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel has provided significant investment and willpower to fund national ambitions. In September 2023, Niel invested €200 million ($212 million), splitting that money between funding for startups like Mistral, an AI research lab called Kyutai, and a cloud supercomputer powered by Nvidia. “I am the old man who loves entrepreneurs and the idea was always the same: how we can help this talent stay here and create companies,” says Niel.
Niel, a prolific French businessman who owns telecommunications company Iliad, believes European AI companies now have a unique opportunity to act. “If you want to create a search engine from scratch now, you can't win because you weren't there 25 years ago. With AI it is exactly the same,” he says. To compete with the US, Europe must act quickly. “[Or] Ultimately, we will be the most beautiful place in the world for museums. That's good, but maybe we can try to do something different.”
Mistral
In almost every European country there is a startup competing with OpenAI. Yet few make a claim as serious as Mistral. To date, the company has raised €1 billion ($1.11 billion), including a €15 million ($16 million) investment from Microsoft. Since its launch in April 2023, the three co-founders, CEO Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, have convened the startup to release twelve models, including the flagship multilingual text generation model, Mistral Large. With 27 million downloads from public repositories, Mistral's customers (such as telecom company Orange and Hugging Face) use the startup's models to personalize advertising messages or power their own virtual assistants. Mistral's free-to-use chatbot, Le Chat, functions much like OpenAI's ChatGPT and is designed to give the public a way to experiment with Mistral's open source technology. “We have been promoting open source as the only way to make the technology faster and more secure, because there will be more control over it,” CEO Mensch told CNBC in a rare interview, adding that Europe is at a turning point in its race to compete with technical superpowers. “We have willpower and we will make it happen,” he emphasizes. mistral.ai
Sweep
Companies that neglect sustainability face two major risks: regulation and reputation. This is according to Rachel Delacour, CEO of Sweep, who co-founded the sustainability-oriented data management platform with Yannick Chaze and Raphael Güller in 2020. “Every company needs to move to a low-carbon economy,” she says, adding that it is now a competitive advantage for a company to be able to track sustainability targets across its operations. “Ultimately, your customers, your employees and your supply chain will ask what you do.” The startup already works with hundreds of customers, including L'Oréal and British energy group SSE, who license the company's platform to aggregate data from across the supply chain and identify their sustainability weaknesses. For example, a customer who makes water bottles that require hand washing might see how much more water efficient their product would be if customers could clean them in the dishwasher, Delacour says. This year the startup is targeting expansion into the US after raising a total of $100 million (£76 million), with investment from Tony Fadell, the maker of the iPod. sweep.net
Dust
Dust is yet another vibrant AI startup from Paris. Launched in 2023 by co-founders Gabriel Hubert and OpenAI alumni Stanislas Polu, Dust makes custom AI bots for businesses. So far, most customers, including 500 teams at companies like PennyLane and Watershed, are experiencing rapid growth but don't yet have strict processes in place. That means teams are more likely to have the option to build their own specialized content writer or AI feedback analyzer assistant, Hubert says. Armed with €20 million in funding, the idea behind the startup is that office workers don't just need one multi-functional AI assistant; instead, they need a range of highly specialized models from which to choose to perform different tasks. “That level of customization ensures that they get a report when they need it [spreadsheet] when they need it, or an actionable, interactive graph,” says Hubert. dust.tt
H
When news leaked that a group of engineers working on advanced models at Google's AI division, DeepMind, were preparing to launch their own company in early 2024, investors rushed to lend their support. The company was initially known as Holistic AI, but changed its name to H in May 2024. It has already attracted $220 million (£152 million) in investment, including from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel and venture capital firm Accel. While it's unclear whether the company has any customers — or even products — its elusive co-founder and CEO, Charles Kantor (a former venture resident at Stanford University), has promised that his team will develop “full” artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that could do that. “increasing employee productivity.” So far, little is known about H's mission, although the reputation of its co-founders, DeepMind scientists Laurent Sifre and Karl Tuyls, both considered leaders in their fields, means there's a lot of excitement to find out. hcompany.ai
Bioptimus
Within five months of founding Bioptimus, the company's six co-founders launched the world's largest open source basic model for cancer detection. Trained on hundreds of millions of images, H-optimus-0 identifies cancer cells and genetic abnormalities in tumors, says co-founder and lead researcher Zelda Mariet. For her, this is just the beginning. Current models are very good at performing highly targeted tasks, such as analyzing images of cancerous tissue, she says. But Mariet wants Bioptimus to build a model that can also analyze a patient's DNA, cells and tissue to understand how they are all connected. At the moment, the company is still in the exploratory phase, having raised $35 million (£26.6 million) from investors including French bank Bpifrance and telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel. bioptimus.com
Electricity
The European Commission has predicted that there will be at least 30 million electric cars on European roads by 2030, and EV charging startup Electra is preparing for that moment, with the aim of deploying 2,500 ultra-fast charging points by that date. Since its launch in 2020, it has reached 300 locations across Europe – each with six charging points – including in Paris, Brussels and Pisa. The idea is to make driving an EV seamless and hassle-free. Drivers use the Electra app to reserve charging spots in advance, where charging locations automatically recognize regular users. “What Tesla did with cars is what we are trying to do with infrastructure,” says Aurélien de Meaux, CEO and one of three co-founders, alongside Augustin Derville and Julien Belliato. To date, Electra's high-profile charging stations have enabled more than 1 million 20-minute charging sessions, with French users paying between €0.39 and €0.52 per kWh. The company has raised 304 million euros, including from investment group Eurazeo and the French bank Bpifrance. go-electra.com
Amo
Amo is the latest French startup trying to reinvent social media. The company is led by CEO Antoine Martin, who sold his last social media company, Zenly, to Snap in 2017 for more than $200 million (£152 million). Since launching in 2023, Amo has launched three separate social media apps designed to refocus online relationships with friends rather than influencers: Tilt (double-sided video), Bump (for location sharing) and ID (collaborative mood boards) . Amo has already raised €18 million ($19.9 million) from investors including VC New Wave, which also backed Paris-based social media startup BeReal before it was acquired by app publisher Voodoo. amo.co
Spore.Bio
After working for years as an engineer at Nestlé, Amine Raji became frustrated with the outdated technology the food industry was using to detect bacteria. “That's why there are so many food recalls and sanitary outbreaks,” he says, adding that 420,000 people die every year from foodborne illness. In an effort to put an end to that, the three co-founders behind Spore.Bio – Raji, Maxime Mistretta and Mohamed Tazi – created the Vision device to identify bacteria in seconds. It works by shining a light on the bacteria (a practice called biophotonics) so that machine learning algorithms can identify which type of bacteria is present by studying its response. Since its launch in January 2023, five food factories have been using the prototype and paying a fixed monthly fee for the hardware. The company has raised €8 million ($8.8 million) from investors including Google DeepMind's Mehdi Ghissassi and venture capital firm LocalGlobe. spore.bio
NcodiN
NcodiN is working to become a crucial cog in the complex world of semiconductor manufacturing. “We make the smallest lasers in the world,” says Francesco Manegatti, co-founder and CEO. These lasers, 500 times smaller than the standard size, will allow NcodiN to build a so-called optical chip, which will contain devices a quarter the size of a human hair. Working in the cleanroom of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), NcodiN has so far raised €4.5 million for its plan to build these advanced optical chips, which will one day enable supercomputers to process data quickly and transfer efficiently. between different electronic components. The company is in talks with some of the major chip manufacturers about testing, and is targeting 2028 to deliver its first volume of wafers to customers. ncodin.com
Astran
Atran wants to protect companies against serious cyber attacks. The product, Continuity Cloud, uses Astran's proprietary technology to encrypt and distribute its customers' sensitive data when it is attacked. Astran's backend combines “algorithms in a proprietary architecture that allow your critical data to be encrypted and fragmented before being stored simultaneously across multiple clouds,” says CEO Yosra Jarraya, who co-founded the company in 2021 with Yahya Jarraya and Gilles Seghaier. clients include aerospace company Airbus and French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, while the company has raised $5 million (£3.8 million) to date. Investors include Paris-based seed fund Galion.exe and SISTAFUND, which backs female founders. astra.io
This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 edition of WIRED UK.
