The past decades have seen French talent leaking by the bucketload to the US, tempted by Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge companies and the eye-watering salaries they offer. But now the beginning of a counter-trend has started to emerge — with French techies returning home to launch startups — and few companies embody this as well as Paris-based AI startup Dust.
The company was cofounded in the French capital in 2022 by Stanislas Polu, who had returned from a seven-year stint in the US, where he’d been working as a software engineer at OpenAI. Before that, he’d been at Stripe’s Silicon Valley office like his cofounder Gabriel Hubert, who had come back to France a couple of years earlier to lead healthtech unicorn Alan’s product team.
Dust offers a platform for businesses to build a range of custom-made AI assistants that can help with different tasks like meeting preparation or data analysis. It raised a €5m seed round last year from global investors Sequoia Capital, Seedcamp and Connect Ventures and earlier this month it closed a €15m Series A from the same backers.
At the same time, the team opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate reaching €1m in annual recurring revenue (ARR), says Hubert.
The business is still in its early stages, but the founder says, contrary to a few years ago, building an AI company in France, rather than in the US, hasn’t felt like an uphill struggle.
“France is increasingly establishing itself in the AI sector,” says Hubert. “There is still a lot to prove, nothing is done and things are moving quickly — but we’re accelerating.”
“We shouldn’t lie to ourselves: the best place in the world to start a company is Silicon Valley, and the cost of not being there still exists. But it’s not as high as it was 10 or 15 years ago.”
What does Dust do?
Dust provides a platform that it says helps businesses leverage generative AI models — like those developed by OpenAI and Mistral — to create intelligent assistants based on the client’s data to serve company-specific use cases.
The product resembles a classic SaaS platform like Slack, that any employee can use to interact with and build new assistants. The objective is to give teams the tools to create as many assistants as they need to help improve their productivity.
“Until now, there has been a sort of utopia where people wanted a unique assistant, which seems simple and elegant but in reality doesn’t answer their needs,” says Hubert.
“We see it as: one assistant for one use case.”
Most of Dust’s users are not developers: building an assistant on the platform only requires providing a name for the tool, outlining which data sources it should use and giving it instructions, says Hubert.
Dust’s cofounder says that a variety of use cases are emerging, from meeting assistants to personal coaches who provide advice based on employee feedback and targets.
More than 5,000 employees use the platform within over 250 enterprise customers, says Hubert — including Alan and French fintechs Qonto and Pennylane. Within Alan’s 600-strong workforce, 150 AI assistants have been built using Dust.
Launching in Paris
Dust is one of the several AI startups that have been multiplying in the French capital over the past 18 months. These include headline-grabbing GenAI companies like Mistral, H and Nabla, all of which were launched by alums of Big Tech companies like Meta or Google DeepMind.
French talent, it seems, is increasingly interested in launching businesses at home.
Hubert says that this is the combined effect of Covid, which saw many US-based employees return home and work remotely, and of a structural trend: many Big Tech companies are over a decade old now, and have created a generation of thirty-somethings who are wondering whether to stay abroad.
This has helped pin France on the AI map.
“France is the Silicon Valley of 20 or 30 years ago,” says Dust cofounder Polu.
“In the US, companies are now tens of thousands of employees-strong. Outside of California is where you’ll be able to truly think outside of the box, and there is a lot of energy around AI in France.”
For Hubert, this acceleration is happening faster than in other European tech hubs.
“I’m seeing a lot less happening in London and in Berlin,” he says. “Compared to our European friends, we’re moving ahead.”
There’s undoubtedly an element of national self-promotion going on here, with the UK also beating its chest as the AI industry booms in the country.
Doing business
Paris may be an up-and-coming hub for AI talent, but a lot of business is still happening on the other side of the Atlantic.
“We [Dust] are lucky to be a medium fish in a small pond in Paris, because we have good friends who trusted us in the beginning, but our ambition is not to be the productivity supplier of the Next 40,” says Hubert, in reference to the list of France’s top 40 startups, which feature some of Dust’s customers such as Alan and Qonto.
“There is a propensity and a velocity to experiment [among customers] that is higher in the US. As a platform that wants to become a standard, you have to launch there quickly.”
The startup has recruited one employee in the US and is planning to use some of its Series A cash to keep growing the team on the ground there.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/genai-dust-silicon-valley-paris/
