France’s AI Action Summit may not kick off for a few more days, but 30 kilometers south of Paris on the campus of École Polytechnique, festivities are already underway.
Founded at the end of the 18th century, Polytechnique is today one of France’s most prestigious engineering schools, and was chosen to host ‘Science Days’, an official two-day pre-summit event focused on ‘AI, science and society’.
A huge number of high-profile French AI leaders earned their stripes at Polytechnique. “You can see it in AI labs and in companies across the world: there are polytechnicians everywhere,” says Paul Midy, an MP in president Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition who focuses on tech and startups — and is himself a Polytechnique alumni.
In the startup world, Polytechnique students are some of the most sought-after candidates for AI science and engineering jobs in France. Data produced by the school on its 2022 leavers showed 75% of students had been recruited before the end of their studies, and all of them were employed within six months of leaving, with 15% working in the digital sector.
An increasing number of alumni have become AI founders.
Many of France’s hottest AI startups were born from the brains of former Polytechnique students, including Hugging Face’s Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, Photoroom’s Matthieu Rouif and InstaDeep’s Karim Beguir.
French AI darling Mistral was founded by two polytechnicians, Arthur Mensch and Guillaume Lample — who in turn have hired en masse from the school.
Polytechnique… or ‘l’X’
Polytechnique, also known as “X” or “l’X”, a reference to the algebra term for an unknown sum, specialises in teaching both pure and applied mathematics, disciplines that are central to AI development.
“Maths are the scientific signature of the school,” says Laura Chaubard, the director of Polytechnique.
“The school’s approach is to transmit a theoretical approach… And the fantastic development of AI has significantly blurred the boundary between theory and application.”
The main programme offered by the school is a four-year engineering course including a masters degree, with a strong focus on scientific subjects like maths and physics. French students who join the degree have a military status and follow military training — a peculiarity dating back to the early 19th century when the school became attached to the armed forces ministry.
Admittance to the school is highly selective, with around 500 students entering the four-year engineering program every year. Few of these are women: data from Polytechnique shows that, of the 571 students who entered the four-year engineering degree in 2024, only 17% were women.
Midy says that when he finished his degree at Polytechnique in 2007, few students wanted to launch a company. “If you had wanted to create a startup in France 20 years ago, people would have laughed in your face,” he says.
Since then, the French tech sector has grown significantly. Public bank Bpifrance launched in 2013 to support entrepreneurship and innovation, a dynamic that accelerated when in 2017 president Emmanuel Macron was elected and shared his vision to transform France into a ‘startup nation’.
In 2024, startups in France raised €9bn, according to Sifted data — compared to less than €1.5bn ten years earlier,according to Dealroom data.
Combined with an explosion of interest from investors in all things AI over the past few years, this has encouraged many X alumni to start their own thing.
“There is huge enthusiasm around Gen AI, and there is an ecosystem that hugely supports the creation of small companies,” Sophie Monnier, a former polytechnician who heads X-AI, an alumni group dedicated to AI, tells Sifted. “So it boosts young X students who want to do it.”
“You can see entrepreneurs who launch a company straight after leaving school. There are swarms of them.”
“It’s clearly a trend that we have observed,” says Chaubard. “It’s exploded over the past ten years.”
Back to the mother country
The past few years have also seen Polytechnique alumni coming back to France to launch companies after initially turning to large tech companies with well-funded labs, typically in the US.
Former polytechnician Alexandre Lebrun spent four years at Meta’s AI research lab in Menlo Park before returning to Paris in 2018 to launch AI medical assistant startup Nabla. Stanislas Polu, also an X alumni, worked at Oracle, Stripe and OpenAI in the US before founding Gen AI startup Dust in 2022 in the French capital. Laurent Sifre, the cofounder of buzzy agentic AI startup H Company, which last year raised a $220m seed round, had previously worked for nearly a decade at DeepMind.
“Now that we have an ecosystem in France, the brain drain has strongly reduced, and we’re even seeing people coming back,” says Midy.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/inside-ecole-polytechnique-ai/
