Arlequin AI, a French startup specialising in AI applied to data operations, today announced the closing of a €4.4 million Seed funding round to combat the rising tide of disinformation and restore trust in strategic data insights.
The round was led by Vsquared Ventures with participation from 10x Founders (Germany), Kima Ventures (France), Better Angle (France), and several French business angels, including David Meneret (Mill Hill Capital), Arthur Dénouveaux, Éric Le Maire, and former Meta executives Julien Codorniou and Julien Lesaicherre.
“If Europe wants to play a leading role in AI, it must step out of the shadow of American and Chinese giants. It needs to pursue its own strategy,” says Hugo Micheron, CEO and Co-founder of Arlequin AI. “At Arlequin, we’re not building yet another LLM; we’re developing comprehension models that require no training data and are highly resource-efficient. By cutting across the field, we can reach breakthrough innovations faster and at a fraction of the cost. This funding will allow us to accelerate the deployment of our platform and strengthen Europe’s technological independence.”
Founded in 2024 by Hugo Micheron and Antoine Jardin, Arlequin AI draws on recognised expertise in geopolitics, terrorism, and systemic risk analysis. Micheron is a specialist in radicalisation, jihadism, and Middle Eastern studies (ENS, Princeton, Sciences Po). Jardin is a research engineer at CNRS and PhD in algorithmic sciences, who has contributed to the development of France’s National AI Research Plan.
Together, they have assembled a multidisciplinary team of more than twenty researchers, engineers, data scientists, and analysts to build Arlequin AI.
Arlequin AI develops sovereign data operations platforms based on next-generation unsupervised AI models. It reportedly processes and structures volumes of complex, multilingual data with speed, delivering certified, unbiased, and actionable insights.
Arlequin AI aims to address three major challenges facing public institutions and businesses:
- fragmented and unreliable access to external data
- the explosion of information volumes beyond human analytical capacity
- the manipulation of content that undermines the legitimacy of both institutions and corporations.
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risk Report, disinformation ranks among the top short-term threats, with significant potential to destabilise political systems and governance. By 2028, public and private players are expected to invest over €437 billion in technologies and strategies to detect, counter, and contain hostile and manipulated content.
By developing its own unsupervised AI models, Arlequin looks to enable complete omniscience over any dataset and makes it easy to translate insights into action. Access to its data operations platform enhances large-scale analytical capabilities and amplifies human capacity for action and decision-making.
Unlike mainstream approaches, Arlequin says their platform was built without LLMs, prompts, or pre-trained datasets. It operates with no black box, and its technological pipeline is fully sovereign and 100% auditable. It maps narratives and actors, discovering and ranking signals of any intensity, filtering out noise, generating reports, modeling, and supporting decision-making.
This approach allows Arlequin to shorten strategic decision-making cycles, replace navigation by guesswork with intelligent tooling, and support, guide, and enhance detection efforts on key issues related to security, defense, communication, and corporate strategy.
Jardin, CTO and Co-founder, adds: “We combine bold DeepTech ambition with the ability to roll out new, specialised products every six months. Our models work like a medical imaging scanner: you simply input the data, and it reveals its natural structure – giving users instant access to the underlying strategic information.”
Arlequin’s technology is currently deployed in three European countries. It supports public institutions (ministries, government agencies), public and private media organisations (including Radio France), and several major European corporations (including BNP Paribas Group).
Arlequin is also building research partnerships with Princeton University, the University of Santa Barbara, INRIA, and Sciences Po. Its platform, designed to be accessible to nonengineers, is adaptable to other sectors as well: financial services (trend and risk detection, fraud prevention, due diligence), healthcare, energy and environment (demand forecasting, reputation analysis), logistics (supply chain management, disruption forecasting), e-commerce and marketing (personalisation, dynamic segmentation), manufacturing, and insurance (improved underwriting and fraud detection).
Maria Juesas Portelés, Venture Partner at Vsquared Ventures, adds: “We live in an era where information has become a currency – just like disinformation. Arlequin combines world-class technological expertise with a unique understanding of today’s geopolitical and strategic challenges. It’s precisely the kind of sovereign technology Europe needs to safeguard its independence and navigate through information chaos.”
The funds raised will enable the company to double its R&D team, accelerate onpremise integrations, and expand its presence across Europe and internationally.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/06/paris-based-arlequin-ai-secures-e4-4-million-to-fight-disinformation-with-sovereign-unsupervised-ai/
