The greatest western AI labs are taking a break shooting establish cooperation as part of a recent acceleration program for European start-ups building applications based on their models. The program, called F/ai, will be run by the Station F incubator based in Paris.
On Tuesday, Station F announced that it has partnered with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral, which it says marks the first time all companies are participating in one accelerator. Other partners include cloud and semiconductor companies AWS, AMD, Qualcomm and OVH Cloud.
The accelerator is actually a crash course for early-stage startups, during which founders attend classes and lectures, consult with specialists, and meet potential investors and customers. The overall goal is to facilitate startups bring their ideas to market as quickly as possible.
The 20 startups from each F/ai cohort will undergo a curriculum specifically focused on helping European AI startups generate revenue earlier in their lifecycle, which will in turn facilitate secure the funding needed to expand into the world’s largest markets. “We are focused on rapid commercialization,” says Roxanne Varza, director of Station F, in an interview with WIRED. “Investors are starting to feel like, ‘European companies are nice, but they’re not getting to the $1 million revenue mark fast enough.'”
The accelerator will operate for three months, twice a year. The first edition started on January 13. Station F did not disclose which startups make up this cohort, but many of them have been recommended by Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Lightspeed or one of the other VC firms participating in the program. All startups create AI applications based on core models developed by collaborating labs, in areas from agent-based AI to procurement and finance.
Instead of direct funding, participating founders will receive over $1 million in loans that can be redeemed for access to AI models, computation, and other services from partner companies.
With few exceptions, European companies have so far lagged behind their US and Chinese counterparts at every stage of the AI production line. To try and close this gap, Great Britain AND EU governments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to support domestic AI companies and develop the national data center and energy infrastructure necessary to train and operate AI models and applications.
In the US, tech accelerators like Y Combinator have spawned many household names, including Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash and Reddit. OpenAI itself was created in 2015 with the help of funds from Y Combinator’s then-research department. Station F intends for F/ai to make a similar impact in Europe, making domestic AI startups more competitive internationally. “It is designed for European founders with global ambitions,” says Varza.
The program also provides an opportunity for US AI labs to plant further seeds in Europe, using grants to encourage a recent generation of startups to develop their technologies.
Once a developer starts building on a specific model, it’s rarely effortless to switch to an alternative, says Marta Vinaixa, partner and CEO at VC firm Ryde Ventures. “When you build on top of these systems, you also build on top of the behavior of the systems – the weirdness of them,” he says. “If you start with a primer, at least on the same project, you won’t change it.”
The earlier in the lifecycle a company begins to develop based on a specific model, Vinaixa says, the more this effect is magnified. “The sooner you start, the more you accumulate, the more difficult it becomes,” he says.