The French capital has been experiencing AI fever over the past two years and has launched some of Europe’s most talked-about startups, including Mistral, which is now valued at $6.2 billion (£4.7 billion). This is partly due to the support the industry has received. President Emmanuel Macron has given French AI startups forceful political support, while telecommunications billionaire Xavier Niel has secured major investments and the will to finance national ambitions. In September 2023, Niel invested 200 million euros ($212 million), splitting the money between funding startups like Mistral, an AI research lab called Kyutai and a cloud supercomputer powered by Nvidia. “I’m an old guy who likes entrepreneurs and the idea was always the same: how can we help this talent stay here by creating companies,” says Niel.
Niel, a prolific French businessman who owns the telecommunications company Iliad, believes that European artificial intelligence 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. It’s exactly the same with artificial intelligence,” he says. To compete with the US, Europe must act quickly. “[Or] in the end we will be the nicest place for museums in the world – that’s good, but maybe we could try to do something a little different.”
Mistral
Almost every European country has a startup that can compete with OpenAI. However, few would argue that it is as solemn as Mistral. The company has raised €1 billion ($1.11 billion) so far, including €15 million ($16 million) in investment from Microsoft. Since its launch in April 2023, the three co-founders, CEO Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, have led the startup to launch 12 models, including its flagship multilingual text generation model, Mistral Immense. With 27 million downloads from public repositories, Mistral’s customers (such as telecommunications company Orange and Hugging Face) exploit the startup’s models to personalize promotional messages or power their own virtual assistants. Mistral’s free chatbot, Le Chat, works similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is designed to provide the public with the opportunity to experiment with Mistral’s open source technology. “We promote open source software as the only way to make technology faster and more secure because it requires greater control” – CEO Mensch he said CNBC, in a sporadic interview, added that Europe is at a turning point in the race to compete with technology superpowers. “We have the willpower and we will make it happen,” he insists. mistral.ai
Sweep
Companies that neglect sustainability face two main threats: regulation and reputation. That’s according to Rachel Delacour, CEO of Sweep, who co-founded the sustainability-focused data management platform in 2020 with Yannick Chaze and Raphael Güller. “Every company needs to transition to a low-carbon economy,” he says, adding that now being able to track sustainability goals across its operations is a competitive advantage for a company. “Eventually, your customers, your employees, your supply chain will ask what you do.” The startup already works with hundreds of clients, including L’Oréal and British energy group SSE, which license the company’s platform to collect data from across the supply chain and identify sustainability vulnerabilities. For example, a customer that produces water bottles that need to be washed by hand would be able to see how much more water proficient their product would be if customers could wash them in the dishwasher, Delacour says. This year, the startup is focusing on expanding into the US after raising a total of $100m (£76m) with an investment from iPod creator Tony Fadell. Sweep.net
Dust
H
When news leaked that a group of engineers who had been working on advanced models at Google’s artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, were preparing to launch their own company in early 2024, investors rushed to provide support. Initially known as Holistic AI, the company only changed its name to H in May 2024. It has already secured investments worth $220m (£152m), 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 Stanford University resident), has promised that his team will develop “full” artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that would “enhance employee productivity.” Little is known about Mission H so far, although the reputation of its co-founders, DeepMind scientists Laurent Sifre and Karl Tuyls, both considered leaders in their field, means its discovery is very exciting. hcompany.ai
Bioptimus
Within five months of founding Bioptimus, the company’s six co-founders launched the world’s largest open-source cancer detection model. Trained on hundreds of millions of images, H-optimus-0 identifies tumor cells and genetic abnormalities in tumors, says co-founder and principal investigator Zelda Mariet. For her, this is just the beginning. Current models are really good at performing very precise tasks, such as analyzing images of cancer tissue, he says. However, Mariet wants Bioptimus to build a model that can also analyze a patient’s DNA, cells and tissues to understand how they are connected to each other. The company is currently 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
Elektra
European Commission yes forecast that by 2030, at least 30 million electric cars will be driving on European roads, and the start-up Electra, dealing with charging electric vehicles, is preparing for this moment, with the goal of launching 2,500 ultra-fast charging points by then. 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 operating an electric vehicle smooth and hassle-free. Drivers use the Electra app to book charging spots in advance, and charging points automatically recognize regular users. “What Tesla did with cars, we are trying to do with infrastructure,” says Aurélien de Meaux, CEO and one of three co-founders, along with Augustin Derville and Julien Belliato. So far, Electra’s eye-catching charging stations have enabled over a million 20-minute charging sessions, with French users paying between €0.39 and €0.52 per kWh. The company has raised 304 million euros ($338 million), including from investment group Eurazeo and 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 business 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 instead of influencers: Tilt (two-sided video), Bump (for location sharing), and ID (shared mood boards). Amo has already raised 18 million euros ($19.9 million) from investors including VC Novel Wave, which also backed Paris-based startup BeReal before it was acquired by app publisher Voodoo. amo.co
Spore.Bio
After years of working as an engineer at Nestlé, Amine Raji became frustrated with the obsolete technology used in the food industry to detect bacteria. “That’s why we have so many food recalls and outbreaks,” he says, adding 420,000 people die every year from foodborne illnesses. To prevent this, the three co-founders of Spore.Bio – Raji, Maxime Mistretta and Mohamed Tazi – created the Vision device that can identify bacteria in seconds. It works by illuminating bacteria (a practice called biophotonics), so machine learning algorithms can determine what type of bacteria is present by examining its response. Since its launch in January 2023, five food factories have been using the prototype, paying a fixed monthly fee for the equipment. The company has raised 8 million euros ($8.8 million) from investors including Google DeepMind’s Mehdi Ghissassi and VC firm LocalGlobe. spores.bio
NcodiN
NcodiN is working to become a key cog in the complicated world of semiconductor manufacturing. “We produce the smallest lasers in the world,” says Francesco Manegatti, co-founder and CEO. These lasers, 500 times smaller than standard sizes, enable NcodiN to build a so-called optical chip containing devices one-quarter the size of a single human hair. Working in the cleanroom of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), NcodiN has so far raised 4.5 million euros ($4.9 million) for its plan to build these sophisticated optical systems that will one day enable supercomputers to quickly and efficiently transfer data between different electronic parts. The company is in talks with some major chipmakers about testing and plans to deliver the first batch of wafers to customers in 2028. ncodin.com
Astra
Astran wants to protect companies against solemn cyberattacks. Its product, Continuity Cloud, uses proprietary Astran technology to encrypt and distribute its customers’ sensitive data when they are under attack. Astrana’s backend combines “algorithms in a patented architecture that enables critical data to be encoded and fragmented before being stored in multiple clouds simultaneously,” says CEO Yosra Jarraya, who co-founded the company with Yahya Jarraya and Gilles Seghaier in 2021. Astrana’s clients include an aerospace company Airbus and French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, with the company raising $5 million (£3.8 million) to date. Investors include the Paris-based seed fund Galion.exe and SISTAFUND, which supports female founders. astran.io
This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of WIRED UK.