As day two the AI Action Summit in Paris gets underway, all eyes are on the French startups helping steer the direction of European innovation.
With President Emmanuel Macron overseeing a flurry of announcements on Monday — including multi-billion euro investments in homegrown AI champions and hyperscale data centres — Sifted compiled the 10 most exciting AI startups to come out of France in recent years.
Mistral AI
Without a doubt France’s buzziest AI startup right now, Mistral launched with a bang in 2023 when it raised a €105m seed round off the promise to build made-in-Europe large language models (LLMs) that could compete with those developed by US tech players like ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Meta.
In less than a year, the startup secured more than €1bn in funding from top VCs like General Catalyst, Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz. It also reached a €5.8bn valuation. Often showcased as one of Europe’s best bets to compete in the AI race, Mistral is fast growing both at home and abroad, including in the US. Sifted reported that in 2024, the company achieved €30m annual recurring revenue (ARR).
On Monday, Mistral announced it had partnered with German startup Helsing to develop LLMs for defence. Sifted later reported Mistral had been seeking defence contracts with governments across Europe.
H
Secretive AI startup H Company made waves when it raised a $220m seed round last year, before making headlines again three months later when three of its five cofounders left the company. This left ex-DeepMind researcher Laurent Sifre and Charles Kantor, a former Stanford University computational mathematics researcher, to lead the business.
Since then, H has kept largely under the radar. In November the company released its first product, Runner H, in private beta — an AI agent that combines an LLM with a visual language model (VLM), which the startup says can turn “instructions into precise actions”.
Owkin
AI-for-biotech company Owkin applies AI to medical research to improve drug discovery, clinical trials and diagnostics. The scaleup partners with academic institutions and hospitals to access high-quality patient data, a key differentiator in an industry that has significant constraints and regulations on data.
Owkin reached a billion-dollar valuation in 2021 when it raised a $180bn round from French pharmaceutical company Sanofi, which also came with a $90m collaboration over three years to research new treatments for certain types of cancers. In 2022, it announced another multi-year partnership with US pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb, in which Owkin received $80m in upfront fees and equity investment, with potential for another $100m in future payments.
Bioptimus
Bioptimus was launched in early 2024 by top executives from Owkin, and incubated with the French unicorn. It builds foundational AI models for biotech, and says that instead of generating text, like LLMs do, its models will be able to understand and simulate the complex behaviour of organisms thanks to training datasets that range from genetic code and DNA profiles to biopsy imaging and clinical data. Bioptimus raised a $41m Series A this year, less than a year after securing a $35m seed round.
Poolside
Poolside was originally launched in the US by Jason Warner, the former CTO of GitHub, and serial entrepreneur Eiso Kant. The startup caused much excitement when it raised a $126m seed round in 2023 with a number of French investors, and moved its base to Paris; a $500m Series B at a $3bn valuation followed just over a year later, before Poolside had publicly released a product. The company is building a foundational GenAI model to help developers write software code, with its first product expected to take the form of an assistant for developers.
Adaptive ML
Adaptive ML provides tools for companies to deploy and fine-tune GenAI models in a faster, more efficient way. The startup’s founding team includes a number of ex-Hugging Face employees — CEO Julien Launay, Daniel Hesslow, Alessandro Cappelli and Guilherme Penedo — and Olivier Cruchant, who joined from the machine learning team at Amazon Web Services.
While Adaptive is technically HQ’d in New York, the majority of its AI-focused team is based in Paris. Last year, the company raised a $20m seed round at a $100m valuation, led by Index Ventures, with participation from US investor Iconiq, French family office Motier Ventures and VC Iris.
Photoroom
Founded in 2019, Paris-based startup Photoroom is a Y Combinator alum that provides a GenAI tool for photo editing. The company broke even a year after it launched and remains one of the few profitable GenAI companies in the world, having reached €50m in annual recurring revenue in 2023. Cofounders Matthieu Rouif and Eliot Andres oversee a team of 80 employees spread across Europe, with a large proportion based in Paris.
In February last year, the company raised a $43m Series B at a $500m valuation. Speaking to Sifted, Rouif said: “Our approach has been to start with users’ needs to develop useful models. The secondary effect of this is to create revenue, because you know exactly what the purpose of your product is.”
Fluidstack
Founded in 2017, Fluidstack is the so-called ‘Airbnb for GPU power’, allowing customers to instantly reserve clusters of Nvidia computer chips to supercharge their AI capabilities. At the AI Action Summit in Paris, it was announced that Fluidstack had signed a memorandum of understanding with the French government to build one of the world’s largest decarbonised AI supercomputers.
The new facility will provide up to 1 gigawatt (GW) of dedicated AI compute power, with plans to increase that further by 2028. Announcing the deal, French president Emmanuel Macron said: “This €10bn agreement with Fluidstack embodies my ambition. We must not slow down because the world is accelerating and the battle for innovation is happening now.”
Nabla
Paris-based Nabla has built an AI assistant for doctors — the “Nabla Copilot” — which listens in on clinical consultations and drafts notes summarising the key points, including everything from symptoms and diagnosis to prescription. Last year, the company raised a $24m Series B to fuel its expansion into the US, led by global VC Cathay Innovation with participation from French investor Zebox Ventures.
“Clinical documentation is only the beginning for Nabla,” cofounder Alex Lebrun said at the time. “Health systems are looking to leverage the AI opportunity to support their healthcare teams in many different aspects; we are getting ready to be there every step of the way.”
Dust
Founded in 2022, Dust provides clients with a platform developed to help businesses leverage generative AI models, like those developed by OpenAI and Mistral, to create tailor-made intelligent assistants which can be deployed in company-specific use cases. The company’s platform is designed to be user-friendly: building an assistant only requires providing a name for the tool, telling it which data sources to use and then giving it instructions.
Last year, Dust closed a €15m Series A backed by global investors like Sequoia Capital, Seedcamp and Connect Ventures.
“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,” cofounder Gabriel Hubert previously told Sifted. “We see it as: one assistant for one use case.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/10-french-startups-to-watch-as-ai-action-summit-unfolds-in-paris/
