France has rapidly risen in the European startup rankings, driven by bold government initiatives like La French Tech and the world's largest startup campus, Station F. Paris is a powerhouse for deep tech, AI, and cleantech, supported by a strong scientific research base and increasing private VC investment. A growing pool of serial entrepreneurs is helping the ecosystem mature. The directory currently lists 242 organisations across 26 cities.
242 entries.
Founded in 2015 by Alexandre Fourtoy. 1Kubator is a private incubator network in 10+ cities that forms startups from scratch in a 10-month program, and provides pre-seed funding typically €15K-€35K (often around €25K for about 10% equity) via the 1KVEST fund managed by Phitrust Impact Investors. Supported 500+ entrepreneurs. Scope: National.
360 Capital is a French-Italian venture capital firm founded in 2006, with offices in Paris and Milan. The firm manages approximately EUR 700M and invests from seed through growth stage, focusing on deep tech, industrial automation, cybersecurity, and enterprise software. 360 Capital has backed unicorns including Exotec (warehouse robotics), as well as Sigfox, Believe, and Scality. Led by partners with deep operational backgrounds, the firm provides strategic support in scaling hardware-software businesses and navigating European industrial ecosystems.
42 is a tuition-free, project-based computer-science school founded by Xavier Niel in 2013, with its flagship campus in Paris and a global network of over 50 campuses across more than 30 countries. The school has no teachers, no classes, and no formal degrees — students progress through a peer-driven, gamified curriculum tackling C, systems programming, web, AI, and DevOps projects. With more than 25,000 active students worldwide and a selection bootcamp (the Piscine) that admits applicants without prior coding experience, 42 has become a major pipeline of engineering talent into the European startup ecosystem and a structural piece of France's tech-skills infrastructure.
Founded 2012 by 50 entrepreneurs. Accelerator offering hands-on mentorship and seed investment for tech, impact, and healthtech ventures; the mentor network includes founders behind BlaBlaCar, Le Bon Coin, and Showroomprivé. Support: equity investment, mentorship, Paris workspace. Scope: National.
Co-founder and former CTO of Sorare, building the blockchain-based fantasy-sports platform he started with Nicolas Julia in 2018.
Co-founder and co-CEO of Mirakl, leading the marketplace-software company's US and global expansion. He co-founded the company with Philippe Corrot after an earlier e-commerce venture.
Agoranov is a Paris-based public incubator founded in 2000 by a consortium of universities and research institutions. It supports science- and technology-intensive startups, often spun out of academic labs, and has backed 400+ startups that raised €1.5B+ and created 10,000+ jobs. Program: office space in central Paris, a 6-month renewable incubation program with tailored mentorship, research access, grant support, and investor introductions. As a public-interest incubator, Agoranov is equity-free and funded by French public institutions and the City of Paris. Unicorn alumni: - Doctolib - Alan - Criteo
Grassroots networking meetup in Paris for early-stage AI founders, angels, and local builders. Smaller format designed for candid conversations, quick pitches, and co-founder or talent discovery in the pre-seed ecosystem.
A one-day technical AI conference organised by cloud provider Scaleway at Station F in Paris, dedicated to AI breakthroughs, research and product demonstrations for leaders and engineers. The event spotlights frontier models, infrastructure and applied AI for the European ecosystem.
Aircall is a Paris-based fintech-adjacent software company founded in 2014 that provides a cloud-based business phone and call-centre platform, integrating voice calling with CRM and helpdesk tools and adding AI-powered conversation intelligence. It serves sales and support teams at thousands of companies and reached unicorn status in 2021.
Aktantis is a world-class European deeptech competitiveness cluster founded in 2005 and based in Sophia Antipolis, France, federating an innovation ecosystem focused on digital transition across microelectronics, IoT, cybersecurity, AI, and photonics. With over 300 member organizations, Aktantis supports companies through project financing, growth acceleration, international expansion, and cybersecurity protection, with member startups collectively raising over 500 million euros in funding and investing 1.5 billion euros in R&D. The cluster participates as a partner in SIDO Lyon as part of its European deeptech ecosystem development mission.
Alan is a Paris-based health insurance and digital health platform founded in 2016 by Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (CEO) and Charles Gorintin (CTO) — the only new independent health insurer licensed in France since 1986. It combines group and individual health insurance with a mobile super-app offering reimbursements, telemedicine, mental-health support (Alan Clinic) and Mo, an AI health assistant delivering doctor-reviewed answers. By early 2026 Alan served over one million members across France, Belgium, Spain and Canada, with €785M ARR in 2025 (up 53%) and operational profitability in France. Alan has raised roughly €754M across eight rounds. It reached unicorn status in 2021 with a €185M Series D led by Coatue, and in March 2026 a €100M Series G led by Index Ventures — a backer since its Series A — valued the company at €5bn. Other investors include Temasek, Teachers' Venture Growth, Coatue, Lakestar, Partech, Belfius and DST Global.
Developed a proprietary biomaterial made from albumin — fully biocompatible and biodegradable — engineered for next-generation drug delivery and tissue engineering, with natural tumour tropism and built-in imaging visibility. Founded 2023.
Alex Kaluzny serves as Chief Technology Officer at Doctolib, one of Europe's foremost digital health unicorns, where he leads engineering and technical architecture for a platform used by over 80 million patients across France, Germany, and Italy. In this role he drives the company's technology strategy including its expansion into AI-assisted clinical tools and cross-border healthcare services. He is a prominent figure in the European health technology ecosystem and a recognised speaker on digital health innovation and enterprise technology at European policy forums.
Co-founder and CEO of Nabla, the clinical-AI assistant for clinicians. A repeat AI founder, he previously built VirtuOz and Wit.ai (acquired by Facebook) and led conversational-AI research at Meta.
Co-founder and CEO of Qonto, the business-banking platform for SMEs and freelancers he co-founded in 2016. He scaled it into one of Europe's most valuable fintechs, backed by Tiger, TCV and Alven.
Alven is an independent Paris-based venture capital firm founded in 2000 by Guillaume Aubin and Charles Letourneur, making it one of the oldest and most established VC institutions in France. The firm manages €2 billion in assets under management across six successive funds, with its latest fund closing at €350 million in 2022. Alven focuses on seed through Series B investments across B2B software, fintech, marketplaces, developer tools, and consumer technology, predominantly backing French and European startups. Notable unicorn investments include Qonto, Dataiku, and Algolia, alongside a broader portfolio of 164 companies that includes Ankorstore, OpenClassrooms, Happn, and Meero.
Ankorstore is a Paris-based B2B wholesale marketplace founded in 2019 that connects independent brands and makers with independent retailers across Europe, handling discovery, ordering, payment terms and logistics. It aims to help local shops compete with large chains and reached unicorn status in 2022.
Aqemia is a Paris-based pharmatech company building an AI-driven drug discovery platform that combines quantum-inspired physics and machine learning to generate and prioritise novel drug candidates at scale. Founded in 2019 by quantum physics researcher Maximilien Levesque and former BCG consultant Emmanuelle Martiano, the company aims to design new molecules faster and cheaper than traditional methods. It raised a 60M euro Series A and later a $38M round led by Cathay Innovation in December 2024, bringing total funding past $100 million as it moves toward clinical trials and global expansion, including a London office.
Arcads is an AI-powered platform for creating video advertisements, primarily UGC-style ads featuring AI actors and avatars. Users provide a script, choose or customise an avatar, and the platform generates polished video ads with localisation across 30+ languages. It targets performance marketers, direct-to-consumer brands, and marketing agencies. Founded in 2024 by Dylan Fournier and Romain Torres, the company raised a $16 million seed round in December 2025 led by Eurazeo and said it was already profitable, with more than half of its users based in the United States.
Founder and CEO of Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), the digital marketing and CRM platform he started in 2012 to give small businesses affordable email and automation tools, scaling it across Europe and beyond.
Arthur Bataille is the CEO of NEVERHACK Group, a European cybersecurity company headquartered in Paris, France, that provides AI-native defence services, managed detection and response, and EU-sovereign security infrastructure to organizations across Europe. Under his leadership, NEVERHACK has expanded across multiple European countries and established itself as a key player in the EU cybersecurity market. He is a confirmed opening speaker at the Nordic Baltic Security Summit 2026 in Tallinn, Estonia.
Co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, the open-weight large-language-model company that became Europe's flagship AI lab. A former DeepMind researcher, he co-founded Mistral in 2023 and raised some of Europe's largest AI rounds.
Co-founder and CEO of Pennylane, the accounting and financial-management platform for SMEs and accountants. He scaled it into one of France's fastest-growing fintechs, backed by Sequoia and Partech.
Develops a patented near-infrared fluorescent coating (NICE) for surgical instruments, letting surgeons visualise tools inside the body during minimally invasive procedures. Spun out of Strasbourg's Laboratory of Bioimaging and Pathologies.
Co-founder and CEO of Electra, the fast EV-charging network deploying hubs across Europe. He co-founded the company in 2021 and raised large rounds from Eurazeo, PGGM and others.
Back Market is a leading European marketplace for refurbished electronics, connecting certified refurbishers with consumers looking for affordable, sustainable alternatives to new devices. The platform covers smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other consumer electronics, with quality grading and warranty guarantees. Valued at $5.7 billion after its 2022 Series E, Back Market operates across Europe and the US and is a flagship example of the circular economy model.
Co-founder and CEO of Riot, the employee-cybersecurity platform for awareness training and phishing simulation. He previously co-founded and was CTO of the open-banking startup October.
Co-founder and CEO of Verkor, the low-carbon battery-gigafactory company building cells for electric vehicles in northern France, backed by Renault, EQT and Macquarie.
Develops a smart robotic canopy system that protects vineyards from climate hazards — hail, frost, excess heat and heavy rain. Solar-powered actuators deploy a retractable, recyclable fabric over vine rows on demand, controllable remotely.
Organised by RX France, Big Data & AI Paris is one of Europe's largest data and AI gatherings, held 15–16 September 2026 at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. The two-day event combines 220+ exhibitors with the 'Innovative Minds' conference programme spanning tech, governance, and business tracks, drawing around 15,000 professionals.
Leading European construction-tech and PropTech event focused on BIM, digital twins, and smart buildings, drawing 10,000+ professionals to Paris. The expo is free with registration; conference passes cost about EUR 450. A strong launchpad for startups in energy-efficient design, AI-driven site management, and real estate digitalization.
Specialized bioeconomy and bioenergy event covering biomass, waste-to-energy, and carbon capture. Price: free for verified professionals or about EUR 50-100. Includes startup pitches and B2B matchmaking for industrial pilots.
Europe's leading partnering event for early-stage life-sciences innovation and technology transfer, in its 15th edition at Parc Chanot in Marseille. Built around one-on-one partnering meetings, it is ideal for biotech and medtech founders seeking licensing deals, academic collaborations, and early investors.
Bioptimus is the self-proclaimed "Mistral of Biology," spun out in early 2024 by a team of alumni from Google DeepMind and Owkin, including CEO Jean-Philippe Vert. The company is building what it calls the first universal foundation model for biology. Where large language models were trained on text to learn human language, Bioptimus trains on biological data—DNA sequences, protein structures, cellular imagery, and clinical phenotypes—to infer the underlying rules of life. The ambition is not just better predictions but a unified biological reasoning layer that can simulate outcomes before expensive lab work happens. By 2026, Bioptimus has moved from a research thesis to early commercial traction. After a $41M Series A in 2025, the company released its first commercial model that can predict how a specific molecule will interact with a human cell with unusually high accuracy. This enables in-silico screening that reduces wet-lab costs and improves hit rates for drug discovery. French pharma leaders such as Sanofi have begun using these models to prioritize compounds and compress early-stage discovery timelines. The product value is immediate: fewer failed experiments, faster candidate selection, and deeper mechanistic insight. Bioptimus' roadmap focuses on "multi-scale biology," connecting the micro level (genomics and proteomics) to the macro level (patient outcomes and clinical data). Rather than being limited to protein folding, the models aim to bridge across data modalities so a genetic mutation can be linked to disease pathways, tissue behavior, and potential therapeutic interventions. This requires data breadth and regulatory trust, and Bioptimus is building a defensive moat through European data sovereignty. It leverages partnerships with European research hospitals and biobanks to access high-quality patient data that is difficult for US competitors to acquire under GDPR constraints. That compliance burden becomes a competitive advantage: safer access, better provenance, and stronger alignment with European health data governance. The company remains deeply embedded in the Paris ecosystem. It was incubated inside Owkin before spinning out, maintains a presence around Station F, and benefits from the cross-pollination between French AI and biotech communities. Its investor base reflects that positioning: Sofinnova Partners, Bpifrance, Cathay Innovation, Xavier Niel, and Frst provide a blend of life-science expertise, sovereign capital, and deep-tech conviction. In 2026, Bioptimus is the clearest European bet that foundation models can unlock biology at scale—and a contender to become the default AI layer for drug discovery in Europe.
BlaBlaCar is the world’s leading long-distance carpooling platform, often hailed as France’s flagship startup success. Founded in 2006 by Frédéric Mazzella (along with Francis Nappez and Nicolas Brusson), BlaBlaCar was born from Mazzella’s realization that countless car journeys had empty seats. The platform (named after users’ self-described chattyness level – “Bla”, “BlaBla”, or “BlaBlaBla”) connects drivers with spare seats to passengers traveling the same way, so they can share the ride and costs. Today, BlaBlaCar has a 100 million-member community across 22+ countries, serving over 25 million travelers per quarter pre-pandemic. It operates in most of Europe and parts of Latin America and Asia, having successfully localized carpooling in markets like Germany, Russia, Brazil, and Turkey. The company also branched into bus travel: in 2018, BlaBlaCar acquired Ouibus from SNCF, rebranding it BlaBlaBus, to offer intercity bus routes alongside carpool rides. BlaBlaCar’s business model charges a roughly 10–20% booking fee from passengers in mature markets, though in new markets it often launches free to build liquidity. Known for its strong community culture, BlaBlaCar emphasizes trust – it introduced verified profiles, ratings, and even an optional “Ladies Only” carpool option. The company achieved unicorn status in 2015 when it raised $200 million at a $1.6 billion valuation and later was valued around $2 billion. Despite the pandemic’s impact on travel, BlaBlaCar rebounded by 2022, even reporting profitability. In 2023, it raised €100 million in financing to fuel growth. BlaBlaCar is often cited in case studies (Harvard, etc.) as a pioneer of the sharing economy in Europe, proving that a people-powered platform can transform intercity transport. By bringing cost-effective travel to millions and fostering new friendships on the road, BlaBlaCar has truly brought “ridesharing” into the mainstream – and stands as one of Europe’s few consumer-tech unicorns with global reach.
Creates carbon-negative materials using biomineralisation — permanently storing CO2 as a limestone filler derived from cement-industry waste. Founded in 2024 at the LSCE in Paris-Saclay, targeting industrial decarbonisation.
National, state-backed scale-up program operated by Bpifrance. Intensive 12–18 month tracks combining training, consulting, and peer learning, with sector-specific programs (industry, health, luxury) and access to non-dilutive funding and Bpifrance capital.
BIG (Bpifrance Inno Génération) 2026, billed as Europe's largest business gathering, takes place on Thursday 8 October 2026 at the Accor Arena in Paris under the theme 'place au culot' (audacity). Organized by Bpifrance, France's public investment bank, it brings tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, SME and corporate leaders, researchers and investors together for hundreds of conferences, masterclasses, expert clinics and networking, free to attend.
Breega is a pan-European early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2016, with offices in Paris, London, and Barcelona. The firm manages over EUR 350M and invests from pre-seed through Series A, writing initial checks of EUR 500K to EUR 5M. Breega focuses on fintech, consumer tech, SaaS, and marketplace models, and has backed companies including Swile, Spendesk, Brigad, and Luko. Led by co-founders Ben Marrel and Francois Paulus, Breega combines capital with an in-house growth team offering hands-on support in hiring, go-to-market strategy, and international expansion across European markets.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a Paris-founded marketing automation and CRM platform serving over 500,000 businesses worldwide. Founded in 2012 by Armand Thiberge, the company rebranded in 2023 to reflect its expansion beyond email marketing into a full suite covering email, SMS, chat, marketing automation, sales CRM, and transactional messaging. Brevo has raised over $190 million and competes with Mailchimp and HubSpot in the SMB segment, with a strong emphasis on affordability and ease of use. The company maintains a large London presence and is one of France's most successful B2B SaaS exports.
Caroline Chopinaud is the Chief Executive Officer of Hub France IA, the national federation uniting France's artificial intelligence ecosystem with over 300 member organisations and 160+ AI startups. In her role she leads advocacy, working groups, and European partnerships for France's AI community. She is a prominent AI ecosystem figure and serves on the Advisory Board of Big Data & AI Paris 2026.
Cathay Innovation is a Paris-headquartered global multi-stage venture capital firm founded in 2015, affiliated with Cathay Capital, with offices in San Francisco, Berlin, Madrid, Shanghai, and Singapore. The firm closed its third fund at $1 billion in 2025 — the largest AI-dedicated fund out of the European Union — bringing total assets under management to over €2.5 billion. Cathay invests in vertical AI, digital health, fintech, mobility, and energy across Europe, North America, and Asia, connecting startups with a corporate network of 20+ Fortune 500 partners. The portfolio of over 120 companies includes Glovo, Ledger, Owkin, Alma, and Descartes Underwriting, with eight unicorns, six IPOs, and 18 acquisitions.
Organizer of ChangeNOW, a global summit focused on climate and impact innovation. ChangeNOW is an event organiser based in Paris, France. Organising events in the Events, Climate Tech, Impact, Sustainability space.
Global climate and impact summit under the Grand Palais roof connecting founders with investors, corporates, and public-sector decision-makers. High-value platform for climate startups seeking B2B/B2G pilots, procurement pathways, and scale partnerships in sustainability and transition infrastructure.
ChangeNOW 2027 returns to the iconic Grand Palais in Paris for three days dedicated to accelerating solutions for the planet. The summit convenes impact-driven startups, investors, policymakers, and corporations around climate, biodiversity, social innovation, and the energy transition. The 2027 edition dates are officially announced on the event website with pre-registration open.
Co-founder and CTO of Alan and a prominent French tech operator who previously worked on data and ML at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. He also co-founded the AI startup Mistral AI as an early backer-operator.
Co-founder and CEO of H (formerly H Company), the Paris AI lab building frontier agentic models. He launched it in 2024 with one of Europe's largest seed rounds, backed by Xavier Niel, Accel and others.
All-in-one e-learning platform co-built for neuroatypical people (ADHD, dyslexia, autism). It offers structured short learning paths, live workshops, peer communities and a customisable neuro-friendly interface designed to reduce cognitive overload. Incubated by Le Perqo, the Île-de-France inclusion-and-disability incubator.
Co-founder and CEO of InnovaFeed, one of the world's largest insect-protein producers, turning insects into sustainable feed and fertiliser at industrial scale, backed by Temasek and Qatar Investment Authority.
Co-founder and CTO of Dataiku, leading engineering for the data-science platform. A former VLC media-player core developer and Exalead engineer, he is one of France's well-known technical founders.
Clever Cloud is a French Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company founded in 2011 and headquartered in Nantes, enabling development teams to deploy and run web applications with automated scaling and fully managed infrastructure. The company is one of France's leading independent cloud providers and a prominent participant in the European cloud sovereignty movement, operating data centers across multiple European regions. Clever Cloud serves as a Platinum sponsor of Sunny Tech 2026.
Community-led cloud conference at CENTQUATRE-PARIS focused on practical engineering sessions over vendor marketing. Strong match for infrastructure startups and DevOps-first teams working on Kubernetes, platform tooling, and secure cloud operations.
Free French collaborative platform for organising interior-design and home-renovation projects. It centralises inspiration images, product selections with prices, room-by-room budget tracking and delivery management in one place — replacing the usual scatter of Pinterest boards, spreadsheets and chat threads — and lets users share the workspace with a partner or artisan.
Comand AI is a Paris-based defence-tech startup founded in 2023 that builds AI software to support military command and decision-making. Its product, Prevail, helps command-centre officers plan and execute manoeuvres under time and resource constraints, using AI simulations and analysis of operational data to speed up planning. CEO and co-founder Loïc Mougeolle previously spent nearly a decade at Naval Group, and the team includes people from companies such as Palantir and OpenAI as well as the French armed forces. The company raised 8.5M euro in seed funding in December 2024 led by Eurazeo, and has worked with the French and German militaries.
One of the world's leading event organisers, headquartered in the Paris region, running trade shows across retail, food, agriculture and technology. Comexposium organises Paris Retail Week / NRF Retail's Big Show Europe at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles in partnership with the National Retail Federation.
Contentsquare is a Paris-based digital experience analytics company founded in 2012 by Jonathan Cherki that captures how users interact with websites and apps and turns that behaviour into insights for product, marketing and UX teams. It grew into one of France's most valuable software companies, acquiring rivals such as Clicktale and Heap, and serves thousands of global brands.
Daphni is a Paris-based venture capital firm founded in 2015 by Pierre-Eric Leibovici, managing over €500 million in assets under management across three funds. The firm targets seed and Series A investments in European technology startups, writing cheques from €500K to €10M, and distinguishes itself through a community-driven model that engages its network of founders, operators, and investors as active contributors to portfolio companies. Daphni's third fund, Daphni Blue, began its first close at €200 million in March 2025, backed by LPs including Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, Bpifrance, and the European Investment Fund. Notable portfolio companies include Back Market, Swile, and Epic, with three unicorns, one IPO, and 22 acquisitions across the portfolio.
Builds eco-friendly data centres using direct chip liquid cooling and hermetic server enclosures, recovering up to 98% of waste heat for building heating or grid re-injection. Cuts data-centre CO2 emissions by up to 82% while reducing energy costs.
Dataiku is an enterprise AI platform that enables data teams to collaboratively build, deploy, and manage machine learning and analytics projects at scale. Founded in Paris and now also headquartered in New York, Dataiku serves over 500 enterprise customers including Unilever, GE, and Sephora. The platform bridges the gap between data scientists, analysts, and business users, and was valued at $3.7 billion after its 2022 Series F round.
Co-founder and COO of Nabla, leading operations and partnerships for the clinical-documentation AI company used by thousands of practitioners.
One of France's largest community developer conferences, two days of technical talks and workshops at the H Arena. Strong for developers and dev-tooling founders wanting depth and access to a large French developer audience.
A one-day community developer conference run by the Google Developer Group at the Diagora congress centre in Labège. For developers and technical founders in the Occitanie ecosystem it offers practical talks across cloud, AI, web, and mobile, plus regional networking.
Developer-first conference centered on software architecture, cloud systems, and modern engineering practices. Strong channel for DevTools and infrastructure startups building technical communities with senior engineers and CTOs.
Doctolib was founded in 2013 in Paris and operates Europe's largest digital healthcare platform, enabling patients to book medical appointments online and access telemedicine services across France, Germany, and Italy. The company reached unicorn status in 2019 with a €150 million Series D led by General Atlantic, and raised a further €500 million in 2022 at a €5.8 billion valuation. It serves tens of millions of patients and hundreds of thousands of healthcare professionals, making it one of the most widely used health platforms on the continent.
A single-track, builder-focused AI conference at the Folies Bergère for around 1,500 AI engineers and researchers, with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, and Databricks. Best for technical founders and AI developers who want deep content over expo-floor noise.
Paris-based enterprise AI platform that lets teams deploy internal AI assistants connected to company knowledge sources such as Notion, Slack, Salesforce, and GitHub without writing code. Raised a $40M Series B led by Sequoia Capital Europe in 2025.
Specialist cardiology congress in Paris focused on heart rhythm disorders, arrhythmia management, and electrophysiology innovation. Attracts 5,000+ clinicians, device manufacturers, and researchers. Registration costs about EUR 600-1000. Particularly relevant for ECG AI, cardiac monitoring, and implantable device startups seeking clinical validation and distribution partners.
Co-founder and CTO of Poolside, leading research on AI for code. He previously founded the code-analysis company source{d} before co-founding Poolside with Jason Warner.
Elaia is a Paris-based venture capital firm founded in 2002, specializing in deep tech, AI, and enterprise software with strong ties to French and European research institutions. The firm manages over EUR 1B across multiple funds and invests from seed to Series B, with typical initial tickets of EUR 1-5M. Elaia has built a portfolio of 100+ companies including Criteo (IPO), Mirakl, Shift Technology, Dental Monitoring, and Lifen. The team maintains close relationships with labs at INRIA, CNRS, and leading universities, making Elaia a go-to partner for research spin-offs commercializing cutting-edge technology.
Paris-based ultra-fast EV charging network operator deploying 400 kW stations across nine European countries, enabling 400 km of range recovery in 20 minutes at strategic urban locations. Raised €304M in a 2024 Series B—France's largest mobility infrastructure round at the time—and operates 400+ stations.
Co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, the business-planning and forecasting platform. A former Index Ventures investor and Google analyst, she co-founded Pigment in 2019 and grew it into a fast-rising enterprise SaaS.
Professional email platform from Toulouse-based NovaForma Studio, combining a unified inbox (Gmail OAuth plus 20+ IMAP providers), AI features (summaries, multi-tone drafting, smart categorisation, 11-language translation), a built-in CRM, email tracking and voice dictation. Positioned as a GDPR-compliant French sovereign alternative to Gmail and Outlook.
Emma is an AI-powered English language learning app developed by the Paris-based EdTech company Edailabs. The app focuses on conversational immersion: learners practice speaking with an AI coach that analyses pronunciation, corrects grammar and adapts the conversation to the learner's level, aiming to reproduce natural spoken-exchange conditions. The product features an interactive avatar tutor. In December 2025 Edailabs raised €5M led by the specialist fund Educapital, with participation from Breega, Seedcamp, DMG Ventures and Yellow Ventures. This is the French AI-tutor company, distinct from the unrelated mattress brand of the same name.
Emmanuel Bernard is a software engineer and open-source leader who created Hibernate ORM, Hibernate Search, and Hibernate Validator, three foundational frameworks in the Java enterprise ecosystem used by millions of developers worldwide. He served for many years as a member of the Java Community Process (JCP) Expert Groups for the Java Persistence API and Bean Validation, directly shaping the standards that underpin Java enterprise application development. Previously a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, he now leads Hexactgon and remains an influential voice in the Java and open-source community.
Co-founder and former CEO of Ledger, the crypto hardware-wallet maker he co-founded in 2014 and grew into a global security leader. A serial entrepreneur, he is also a well-known figure in French startup media.
Europe's largest annual Ethereum conference, organized by the non-profit Ethereum France team and rotating between Paris and Brussels. The 9th edition draws 6,000+ developers, protocol researchers, DeFi founders, and L2 engineers for four days of deep-technical talks, core-dev working groups, and a packed satellite-event calendar of side meetups and hackathons. EthCC is the default summer checkpoint for the European crypto ecosystem — if you're building on Ethereum, this is where the conversations happen. Tickets EUR 600-1,500.
Founded 2009. One of Europe's largest incubators, hosting 200+ startups annually with multi-stage programs from incubation to acceleration, plus labs and funding access. Ranked a top French startup hub; alumni include fintech scaleups and AI firms. Scope: Regional (Hauts-de-France) with international reach.
Eurazeo is a leading European investment group listed on Euronext Paris, managing over EUR 35B in diversified assets including a dedicated venture and growth portfolio. Founded in 2001, Eurazeo's tech investment arm operates from Paris, London, Berlin, and New York, investing EUR 10-50M at Series B through pre-IPO stages. The firm has backed major European scale-ups including 1KOMMA5, Contentsquare, Doctolib, Younited Credit, and Vestiaire Collective. Eurazeo combines patient capital with deep operational expertise in internationalization, M&A, and ESG integration across its portfolio.
Week-long deep-tech programming across Paris with major sessions at Station F and Bpifrance-linked venues, designed to connect science-based founders with industrial buyers and patient capital. Includes deep-tech summit programming across SpaceTech, quantum, robotics, and advanced manufacturing.
Exotec is a Lille-based warehouse robotics company founded in 2015 by Romain Moulin and Renaud Heitz. Its flagship Skypod system uses fleets of autonomous robots that move in three dimensions across warehouse racking to pick, store, and prepare orders at high speed. Exotec became France's first industrial robotics unicorn after a $335 million Series D in 2022 at a $2 billion valuation. The company serves major global retailers including Decathlon, Gap, Uniqlo, and Carrefour across Europe, North America, and Asia. Exotec demonstrates that France can produce world-class hardware and robotics companies, not just software.
Co-founder and president of Vestiaire Collective, the global resale marketplace for pre-owned luxury fashion she co-founded in 2009, helping pioneer the circular luxury economy.
Paris-based cybersecurity company that builds OpenCTI, an open-source threat intelligence platform used by national CERTs, defence agencies, and Fortune 500 security teams. The platform ingests and correlates threat feeds to help analysts map adversary infrastructure and prioritise incident response. Raised a Series A to accelerate international expansion.
Co-founder and CEO of Dataiku, the enterprise AI and data-science platform he co-founded in 2013. He grew it into a global leader valued in the billions, backed by ICONIQ, Tiger and a16z.
Flowdesk is a Paris-based digital-asset trading and technology firm founded in 2020 that provides market-making, liquidity, and trading infrastructure for crypto tokens and exchanges. Its platform helps token issuers and trading venues manage liquidity across fragmented crypto markets. Founded by Guilhem Chaumont, Paul Bugnot, François Cluzeau, and Balthazar Giraux, the company has expanded internationally. After a $50M Series B led by Cathay Innovation in 2023, Flowdesk raised a $102M financing announced in 2025, led by HV Capital with debt provided by BlackRock-managed funds, to scale its market-making services.
The flagship summit of the French quantum ecosystem, held at Station F for its 5th edition. For deeptech founders and researchers it concentrates the country's quantum hardware and software players, corporates, and specialist investors into one day of conferences and demos.
Founder and former CEO of BlaBlaCar, the long-distance carpooling platform he started in 2006 and grew into a global ride-sharing leader. A high-profile figure in French tech, he also co-founded the lobby group France Digitale.
Frédéric Pascal is the Director of the DataIA Institute at Université Paris-Saclay and Vice-President for AI at Paris-Saclay University, one of France's leading research universities. DataIA is France's premier AI research and training institute, bringing together approximately 800 researchers across 47 laboratories and receiving official Cluster-IA certification from the French government in 2024. Pascal is a key figure in France's academic AI ecosystem and serves on the Advisory Board of Big Data & AI Paris 2026.
French Tech Next40/120 is a French government program run by the Mission French Tech that identifies and supports the 120 highest-performing French scale-ups each year. The Next40 cohort (the top 40) is selected based on revenue growth above €100 million or the largest fundraising volumes, while the broader FT120 requires at least €20 million in revenue with 15% annual growth. Selected companies receive prioritized access to public services, international promotion, and regulatory support to help them compete globally.
Government-backed program supporting France's most promising scale-ups and fast-growing tech companies with dedicated resources and visibility, part of the wider La French Tech initiative.
The flagship showcase of the Bordeaux and Nouvelle-Aquitaine tech ecosystem at Stade Atlantique, in its 5th edition with 50 startup stands and 700+ decision-makers. For regional founders it is the key local visibility and networking event with investors and corporate leaders.
French Tech Tremplin is a national programme run by La French Tech, launched in 2019, that promotes equal opportunity in the French tech ecosystem by supporting entrepreneurs from underrepresented and less-privileged backgrounds. It combines grants, incubation and mentoring to help these founders launch and grow their startups across France.
Co-founder and CEO of Dust, building AI agents for the enterprise. A repeat founder, he previously co-founded the product studio Alkemics and worked at Stripe before starting Dust.
France's main annual gathering of video game professionals, in its 8th edition, organised by Game IN and the SNJV at the Université Catholique de Lille. For game-studio founders and developers it is two days of industry talks, workshops, and B2B networking.
French AgriTech startup that rates soil health across 35 agronomic indicators—biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and pollution levels—using AI and sensor data, providing continuous monitoring for regenerative farming operations. Clients include LVMH, Rémy Cointreau, and Barilla. VivaTech 2026 Tech for Change finalist.
Georges Hadziioannou is a professor at the University of Bordeaux and a pioneer in organic and polymer electronics, conducting research on functional materials for energy, displays and flexible devices. He is a keynote speaker at NANOTEXNOLOGY 2026 in Thessaloniki.
Paris-based hybrid human-AI contact-centre platform that deploys governed conversational agents for enterprise customer-experience operations. Unlike fully autonomous systems, GetVocal keeps human staff in control of critical decisions. Clients include Vodafone, Glovo, and Movistar. Raised $26M Series A from Creandum.
Gladia is a Paris-based AI company that provides an API platform for real-time and asynchronous speech-to-text transcription and audio intelligence. Its engine supports more than 100 languages and is designed to handle diverse accents and mid-conversation language switching with low latency. The company positions itself as a developer-focused alternative to transcription services from larger cloud providers, serving use cases such as meeting tools, call analytics and media platforms. Gladia raised a $16M Series A in October 2024 led by XAnge to launch its multilingual real-time transcription and analytics engine.
France's massive industrial gathering with a startup village and Industry 4.0 showcases. Price: free for professionals with badge. Strong for industrial IoT and smart manufacturing startups.
Organiser of GO Entrepreneurs (formerly Salon des Entrepreneurs), a series of large French entrepreneurship events in Paris and Lyon for founders, freelancers and business leaders. The events feature pitch battles, expert panels and networking around starting and scaling a business.
The major entrepreneurship event for the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region at La Sucrière in Lyon, expecting around 10,000 founders, freelancers and business leaders. With roughly 300 speakers and 120 conferences across a main stage and eight stages, it features pitch battles, expert panels and networking.
The leading French event on responsible and sustainable digital technology, held at Station F with around 2,500 participants. For climate and greentech founders it offers conferences, workshops, and an exhibition focused on concrete tools for sustainable digital transition.
Guillaume Laforge is a Developer Advocate at Google and one of the most recognized figures in the Java and open-source software ecosystem. He is the creator of Apache Groovy, a widely adopted dynamic programming language for the Java Virtual Machine, and has contributed to numerous Java community standards and tooling efforts over more than two decades. Laforge is a prolific international conference speaker and a recognized thought leader in cloud-native Java development and generative AI tooling for developers.
Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Mistral AI, leading model research. He previously led the LLaMA project as a research scientist at Meta AI before co-founding Mistral.
H (formerly Holistic) represents France’s second-wave AI builders: less focused on text generation and more focused on action. Founded in 2024 by a team that included former DeepMind researchers such as Charles Kantor and Laurent Sifre, the company drew attention with a seed round that eclipsed prior European records, signaling investor appetite for agentic AI. H’s core thesis is that the next leap is not bigger language models but AI systems that can plan, execute, and verify multi-step workflows across real software interfaces. The company frames this as “RPA 2.0,” using vision-language models to interact with screens and applications rather than brittle scripts and APIs. The firm’s early months were turbulent, including leadership turnover in late 2024, but the product roadmap accelerated. In November 2025 H launched Runner H, a vision-language agent that can see a desktop and operate mouse and keyboard actions to complete tasks such as booking travel, compiling invoices, or processing customer tickets. The release of Surfer-H-CLI soon after gave developers a programmable surface for building web agents, which helped H win mindshare with the European developer community. An acquisition of Mithril Security in 2025 signaled a focus on secure, private agent deployment — a crucial requirement for enterprise adoption, where the biggest fear is an autonomous agent mishandling data or credentials. H is deeply embedded in the Paris AI ecosystem, with early incubation support from Aglae Ventures and strong ties to the Paris AI Hub around Sorbonne and Ecole Polytechnique. Its backers read like a who’s-who of strategic supporters: Accel led financing, Eric Schmidt invested personally, and strategic relationships with Amazon and UiPath position H as a bridge between cloud infrastructure and automation workflows. French tech patrons Xavier Niel and Bernard Arnault provide both capital and political signal value. By early 2026, H is widely watched as a potential category leader in action-oriented AI, competing to become the default “application layer” for autonomous digital workers across Europe’s enterprises.
Hub France IA is the French national federation dedicated to unifying and developing the country's artificial intelligence ecosystem. Recognised as serving the general interest under French law (association Loi 1901), it brings together over 300 member organisations including more than 160 AI startups, 1,000+ individual adherents, and 50+ European partners across large corporations, SMEs, academic institutions, and investors. The organisation facilitates working groups, European partnerships, and collaborative projects to help members navigate the rapidly evolving AI sector.
Co-founder and CTO of Malt, leading the technology behind the freelance marketplace he started with Vincent Huguet in 2013.
Developed Voltage Induced Reverse Osmosis (VIRO), a pressure-free desalination technology that uses a low-voltage panel to drive water through standard RO membranes, removing the need for high-pressure pumps. Spun out of ENS-PSL Paris.
Launched 1999 by Institut Mines-Telecom. Incubator for tech startups from students and researchers with programs like START@IMT and SCALE'Up; focuses on AI, big data, and VR with early-stage funding options. Scope: Regional (Ile-de-France).
Flagship global personal care ingredients trade fair at Paris Porte de Versailles with 10,000+ formulators and brand buyers and 700+ exhibitors. Free with pre-registration or about EUR 100 on-site. Ideal for biotech, green chemistry, and sustainable cosmetics startups seeking ingredient adoption and multinational brand partnerships.
Infopro Digital Trade Shows is a French professional events company that organizes over 35 industry trade shows annually across Europe, Asia, and the United States. They are the official organizer of SIDO Lyon, the leading B2B event for the convergence of IoT, artificial intelligence, robotics, and extended reality technologies, now in its 12th edition. Their broader portfolio spans sectors including construction, automotive, risk and insurance, and industrial transformation, serving major professional communities year-round.
Produces sustainable insect-based ingredients from the Black Soldier Fly for aquaculture, pet food and plant nutrition. Founded in 2016, it has produced over 15,000 tonnes of protein and oil and secured €51M to scale commercial growth.
Organises an annual conference in Paris for insurance professionals to explore innovation, emerging technologies, and future trends in the insurance sector. Running for over a decade, the event gathers hundreds of insurtech founders, underwriters, and digital transformation leaders to discuss AI, embedded insurance, and new distribution models.
Profitable French scale-up providing an AI-first digital operating platform for restaurants and contract catering: POS, self-ordering kiosks, kitchen display systems and an Atlas AI agent for back-office automation. Active in France, Spain, Italy and Morocco with ~800 clients including Elior and Sodexo.
One-day insurtech and digital finance conference in Paris focused on insurance transformation, cybersecurity, and AI-driven underwriting. Brings together insurance executives, brokers, and technology providers. Valuable for insurtech startups building claims automation, risk analytics, and digital distribution platforms for the French insurance market.
Co-founder of Doctolib, part of the founding team that built the medical-booking platform into a European health-tech leader alongside CEO Stanislas Niox-Chateau.
Co-founder and CEO of Poolside, the AI lab building frontier models for software development. He was previously CTO of GitHub and a managing director at Redpoint Ventures.
Co-founder and CEO of Alan, the French digital health insurer he started in 2016 to rebuild health cover around a simple app and preventive care. Under him Alan became one of France's most valuable fintechs, backed by Index, Coatue and Temasek.
Co-founder and Chief R&D Officer of Bioptimus, building foundation models for biology. A leading machine-learning researcher, he was previously a research lead at Google Brain and Owkin and a professor at Mines ParisTech.
Joko is a Paris-based consumer fintech that rewards users with cashback on their everyday purchases. Through a mobile app and browser extension, it automatically detects qualifying transactions at partner retailers and credits users with rewards, both online and in store. The company's technology builds on PSD2 open banking, connecting to users' bank cards to identify eligible spending without manual scanning of loyalty cards. Joko raised a €10M Series A in October 2020, led by Partech and Axeleo, bringing total funding to around €12M at that time.
Co-founder and CTO of Filigran, leading engineering for its open-source threat-intelligence and breach-and-attack-simulation platforms.
Kima Ventures is one of the world's most prolific seed-stage investors, founded in 2010 by Xavier Niel (founder of Free/Iliad) and Jeremie Berrebi. Based in Paris, Kima invests in approximately 100 startups per year with typical ticket sizes of EUR 150K, making it among the most active angel-style funds globally. The firm has backed over 1,000 companies across 50+ countries, with notable investments including Alan, Luko, Mistral AI, and Algolia. Kima focuses on technology generalists at pre-seed and seed, providing fast decision-making and access to Xavier Niel's extensive entrepreneurial network.
La French Tech is the French government's flagship brand and support initiative for the national startup ecosystem, launched in 2013 by the Ministry of the Economy. It operates as a unified banner under which French startups present themselves internationally, and coordinates a network of over 50 local French Tech communities (called 'Capitales') across France and in major cities worldwide. La French Tech administers the French Tech Visa program for international founders, the French Tech Tremplin program supporting underrepresented entrepreneurs, and the high-profile Next40/FT120 scale-up labels. The initiative has been instrumental in transforming France's global image from a bureaucratic economy to one of Europe's most dynamic startup nations, and its branding is ubiquitous at international tech events from CES to VivaTech.
Co-founder and former CTO of H and a deep-learning researcher who previously worked at Google DeepMind on AlphaGo and AlphaZero, bringing frontier-model expertise to the Paris AI startup.
One of Europe's longest-running immersive technology events, focused on practical XR deployment across healthcare, manufacturing, and defense. Strong venue for spatial-computing founders building B2B hardware and software products.
Launched 2014 by Credit Agricole. National accelerator network with 30+ villages across France offering coworking, mentorship, and business connections with CA's banking network. Sector-agnostic (fintech, agritech, etc.). Scope: National.
Ledger is the global leader in hardware wallets for cryptocurrency, providing secure cold-storage devices that protect digital assets offline. The company's Nano S and Nano X devices have sold over 6 million units worldwide, and its enterprise solution, Ledger Enterprise, serves institutional clients including funds and exchanges. Ledger also develops Ledger Live, a companion software for managing crypto portfolios. The company is a cornerstone of Europe's Web3 infrastructure ecosystem.
lemlist is a Paris-based sales engagement SaaS platform built by the company lempire. Originally a cold-email personalisation tool, it has grown into a multichannel outreach platform combining a large B2B lead database, AI-assisted personalisation, and built-in email warm-up (lemwarm) to help sales teams run outbound campaigns and book meetings. It is used by tens of thousands of businesses across more than 100 countries and is part of the broader lempire product family, which also includes lemcal, Taplio and Tweet Hunter. The company scaled largely through product-led growth, and in October 2021 raised $30M from Expedition Growth Capital.
Co-founder and CEO of Neoplants, bio-engineering houseplants to capture indoor air pollutants. A former Google strategist, he co-founded the deep-tech startup with biologist Patrick Torbey.
Founder and CEO of Swile, the employee-benefits and meal-voucher super-app. He previously founded the adtech company Teads, one of France's biggest tech exits, before starting Swile in 2017.
All-in-one loyalty and CRM platform for local retailers. It replaces paper stamp cards with a digital loyalty card in Apple Wallet and Google Pay, supports stamp- or points-based rewards, and automates Google-review solicitation to boost merchants' local SEO — with no app download required from customers.
YC-backed preventive health platform that analyses 110+ blood biomarkers with AI to deliver personalised, physician-reviewed guidance on nutrition, supplementation and lifestyle. Operates across France, the UK, Ireland and Portugal with 10,000+ users since its 2025 launch.
Home insurance startup focusing on prevention, fast claims, and digital-first service. Luko is a startup based in Paris, France at the series c stage. The company operates in the Insurtech, Consumer space. Learn more at their website.
Maha Radhakrishnan, MD, is Executive Partner at Sofinnova Investments, one of Europe's leading dedicated life science venture capital firms. A physician-scientist by training, she brings deep expertise in biopharmaceuticals and drug development to evaluating and supporting therapeutic companies across oncology, rare diseases, and CNS disorders. She is a prominent investor and speaker in the European and global biotech ecosystem.
AI-powered SaaS that helps SMEs and foreign companies respond to French public procurement tenders. Automates DCE analysis, technical proposal drafting and mandatory administrative forms, scanning 20+ procurement platforms in real time.
Malt is a Paris-founded freelancer marketplace launched in 2013 that connects independent professionals with companies seeking project-based talent in tech, marketing, design, and consulting. The platform operates across France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, and the UK, and has over 700,000 registered freelancers serving enterprise clients including Airbus, L'Oreal, and BNP Paribas. Malt has raised over EUR 100 million and manages compliance, contracts, and payments to simplify the hiring process. It is a leading European alternative to Upwork and Fiverr, with a strong focus on local enterprise freelancing.
Marc Simoncini is a French serial entrepreneur and angel investor best known as the founder of Meetic, Europe's largest online dating platform, which he sold to Match Group. After his successful exit, Simoncini became one of France's most active angel investors, co-founding Jainama, a personal investment vehicle through which he has backed over 100 startups. His investments span consumer internet, marketplaces, fintech, and lifestyle brands, with notable bets including companies like Made.com and Sensee. Simoncini is known for writing large angel checks and taking board seats, combining strategic guidance with significant early-stage capital. He is a key figure in France's first generation of internet entrepreneurs who now fuel the next wave of founders.
Co-founder and CEO of Lucis, an AI startup backed by Singular, Kima Ventures and General Catalyst. He co-founded the company to apply generative AI to professional workflows.
Maxime Verrière serves as SVP and Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Arianespace, the French launch services company that is one of the world's leading providers of commercial satellite launch services. Arianespace, headquartered near Paris, has been a cornerstone of European space access since its founding in 1980 and operates the Ariane, Soyuz, and Vega launch vehicles from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou. In his C-suite role, Verrière is responsible for driving Arianespace's strategic direction and transformation agenda during a highly competitive period for the European launch industry.
Meero is a Paris-based photography technology company that uses AI to automate photo editing and connects businesses with a global network of professional photographers. The platform serves industries including real estate, e-commerce, and hospitality, offering on-demand shoots with AI-enhanced post-production. Meero raised over $200 million and was valued at over $1 billion before restructuring operations to focus on its core AI editing technology.
Minalogic is a French competitiveness cluster dedicated to digital transformation in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region, with a focus on AI, cybersecurity, microelectronics, IoT, and photonics. With approximately 450 member organizations spanning startups, SMEs, large corporations, and research institutions, Minalogic has facilitated more than 1,040 labeled and funded innovation projects since 2005 and generated over 16,300 B2B meetings since 2012. The cluster is an ecosystem partner of SIDO Lyon and a connector between industry and innovation communities in the region.
Premier real estate conference with a dedicated PropTech hub. Price: about EUR 2500+. Strong for startups pitching to developers and real estate investors.
Mirakl is a Paris-based enterprise marketplace platform founded in 2012 by Adrien Nussenbaum and Philippe Corrot. The company provides the SaaS technology that enables retailers, manufacturers, and distributors to launch and operate their own online marketplaces, adding third-party sellers alongside their existing product catalogs. Mirakl powers marketplace operations for over 400 enterprise customers including Macy's, Kroger, Carrefour, and Siemens. The company has raised over $800 million, reaching a valuation of $3.5 billion, and is one of France's highest-valued B2B SaaS companies. Mirakl has offices in Paris, London, and Boston, and its platform model reflects the broader shift toward marketplace commerce across enterprise retail.
Founded in April 2023 by former Google DeepMind and Meta AI researchers, Mistral AI has become one of Europe's most valuable AI startups. The company builds frontier large language models such as Mistral Large and Mixtral and follows an open-weight plus enterprise deployment strategy. Its products are used via API, cloud partners such as Microsoft Azure, and local deployments for regulated organizations requiring data control and model transparency. Le Chat is the company's conversational interface built on its model stack.
Develops MSIcare, bioinformatics software that analyses microsatellite instability biomarkers from next-generation sequencing data to guide oncologists in selecting targeted immunotherapy across cancer types. Winner of France's i-Lab 2023.
Paris-based clinical AI company that listens to doctor-patient consultations in real time and auto-generates structured medical notes, referral letters, and billing codes. Used by thousands of clinicians across France, the US, and Canada, reducing documentation time by over 50%.
Naboo is a Paris-based corporate event and seminar booking platform that lets companies plan offsites and team events through a single system covering venues, accommodation, catering, transportation and team-building activities. Sometimes described as the Booking.com of corporate seminars, it is building a software suite to help finance and procurement teams oversee MICE budgets, including spend tracking, policy compliance and invoicing. Founded in 2022, the company raised a 20 million euro Series A round in early 2025 led by Notion Capital to fund European expansion.
Neoplants is one of Europe's most consumer-friendly deep-tech startups, known for engineering "plants with a purpose." Its flagship product, Neo P1, is a golden pothos that has been genetically modified to actively metabolize volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as formaldehyde and benzene—pollutants common in homes due to paint, furniture, and cleaning products. Rather than simply filtering air passively, the plant converts toxins into harmless sugars and amino acids, turning living organisms into functional indoor air purifiers. The company began commercial sales in the United States, where GMO consumer regulations are more permissive, but 2026 marks a strategic pivot back to Europe. Neoplants is positioning itself to launch in the UK and select EU markets as the New Genomic Techniques (NGT) framework evolves. This regulatory shift is crucial: it could unlock a path for consumer biotech products to be sold in Europe at scale. Neoplants is actively engaging with regulators and policymakers to ensure its products meet safety and transparency standards, framing its technology as a climate and public-health benefit rather than a controversial GMO niche. Neoplants is also a serious biotech company under the consumer-friendly brand. It operates a 12,000-square-foot R&D facility in Saint-Ouen, Paris, with capabilities closer to a pharma lab than a greenhouse. The 2026 R&D pipeline includes plants engineered to capture CO2 at orders-of-magnitude higher rates than typical trees, targeting corporate offices and commercial spaces where sustainability investments must be visible and measurable. That positions Neoplants for a dual-market strategy: consumer air purification today, B2B climate infrastructure tomorrow. The company's ecosystem roots are strong. The founders, Lionel Mora and Patrick Torbey, met at Entrepreneur First in Paris, and Neoplants was an early resident at Station F. It also benefited from the Wilco healthcare and biotech accelerator. Its investors reflect the blend of deep-tech and consumer focus: True Ventures led the seed, Heartcore Capital and Collaborative Fund support the consumer angle, and angels such as Niklas Zennstrom and Xavier Niel provide strategic visibility. In 2026, Neoplants represents a "solarpunk" vision of European tech—advanced biology that is both functional and approachable, turning climate and health solutions into products people can live with.
AI platform that lets French SMEs and micro-enterprises respond to public tenders in under an hour, automating DCE analysis and generating full application dossiers including technical proposals, DC1, DC2 and commitment acts.
Co-founder and former CTO of Ledger, designing the secure-element architecture behind its hardware wallets. He is a long-standing expert in Bitcoin and embedded security.
Co-founder and CEO of BlaBlaCar, having led the company's growth, fundraising and acquisitions from COO to chief executive. He previously worked as a venture investor in Silicon Valley.
Co-founder and CEO of Sorare, the fantasy-sports platform built on NFTs and licensed with football, NBA and MLB. He raised one of Europe's largest rounds, led by SoftBank, in 2021.
NUMA is a storied name in the Paris startup scene – both an accelerator and an innovation hub that traces its origins to one of Europe’s first startup programs. Established in 2011, NUMA evolved from the famed “Le Camping” accelerator (run out of a historic building on Rue du Caire). As an accelerator, NUMA ran 3- to 6-month cohorts for digital startups, providing mentorship, community events, coworking space, and investor demo days. It was particularly influential in France’s early startup boom – alumni include successes like Dataiku (AI platform) and Algolia (search-as-a-service), which both passed through NUMA’s programs. Over time, NUMA expanded its scope beyond acceleration into corporate innovation. It launched NUMA Consulting to help large companies implement startup methodologies, and also opened international outposts (NUMA Bengaluru in India and NUMA New York were launched around 2015–2016). In Paris, NUMA’s space became an “innovation hub” – a vibrant campus hosting events, hackathons, and innovation programs for corporates and the community. NUMA was notable for being a public-private effort initially, supported by the City of Paris and corporates, which helped ignite the French ecosystem a decade ago. By the late 2010s, NUMA transitioned its accelerator model – focusing more on themed open-innovation programs (e.g. for smart cities or AI) rather than general batches. It also partnered with the European Commission on projects to spur startup-corporate collaborations. Though NUMA (the accelerator) concluded its last batch in late 2019, the brand still persists as a hub and network of innovation spaces. The legacy of NUMA is significant: it helped institutionalize French startup support and proved the value of mentorship-driven acceleration in Europe. In ecosystem terms, NUMA stands as a pioneer whose model of combining startup acceleration with corporate and community innovation has been emulated widely.
Founder and chairman of OVHcloud, the European cloud and hosting provider he started in 1999 and built into the region's largest independent cloud, taking it public on Euronext Paris in 2021.
European-wide open-source business and technical conference in Brussels, bringing together 5,000+ OSS contributors, European corporate users of open source, and public-sector decision-makers. Program covers enterprise OSS strategy, supply-chain security, European digital sovereignty, and sustainable OSS funding models. Tickets EUR 200-500.
A fully French project-management SaaS (published by Agence Ici) combining Kanban, the Eisenhower matrix, GTD, Gantt charts, automated task-distribution scenarios and performance indicators in one tool designed to reduce cognitive load. It targets SMEs and growing teams wanting a simpler, European-hosted alternative to Asana, Jira or Monday.
OVHcloud is Europe's largest cloud hosting provider, operating a global network of data centers offering dedicated servers, public cloud, private cloud, and web hosting services. Founded in 1999 by Octave Klaba, OVHcloud went public on Euronext Paris in 2021 and serves over 1.6 million customers worldwide. The company is a key pillar of European digital sovereignty, manufacturing its own servers and cooling systems to control costs and reduce dependency on US hyperscalers.
Owkin is a Paris-based AI biotech founded in 2016 that applies machine learning and federated learning across hospital and pharmaceutical datasets to discover drug targets, develop diagnostics and de-risk clinical trials. It partners with pharmaceutical companies including Sanofi and Bristol Myers Squibb, reached unicorn status, and has more recently launched agentic AI tools for biopharma research.
Papernest is a Paris-founded platform that simplifies moving and managing household utility contracts, including energy, internet, and insurance subscriptions. Founded in 2015, the service helps consumers switch or set up providers in minutes, acting as a digital concierge for administrative tasks that are traditionally time-consuming in France and Spain. The company has raised over EUR 130 million and operates with a large engineering team in Barcelona. Papernest serves millions of users and has become one of France's leading consumer subscription management platforms.
Organizer of Paris Blockchain Week, one of Europe's premier Web3 conferences held annually in Paris since 2019. The multi-day event draws over 9,000 attendees including crypto founders, DeFi builders, and institutional investors, featuring hackathons, startup pitch competitions, and side events across the city's blockchain ecosystem.
Premier European gathering for institutional Web3 and digital assets at Carrousel du Louvre. Strong concentration of founders, C-suite decision-makers, and liquidity providers. Startup competition applications close close to event week, with finalists pitching live on stage to investors and industry operators.
Competition track for early-stage Web3 companies at Paris Blockchain Week. Applications close close to event week, with selected finalists pitching on stage to investors and digital-asset industry participants.
Invite-only fintech conference hosted at the Palais Brongniart, gathering 2,500+ senior executives, regulators, and investors from the global financial-services and fintech ecosystem. Content spans open banking, embedded finance, crypto regulation, payments innovation, and insurtech. Tickets EUR 1,500+.
Paris Retail Week, held as NRF Retail's Big Show Europe at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, is a major gathering for the future of retail in Europe. Organised by the National Retail Federation with Comexposium, it brings retailers, brands and technology partners together around retail innovation and commerce tech.
Established 1996. Paris economic development agency running 20+ thematic incubators (sports, foodtech, smart cities, etc.) with coaching, offices, and corporate partners; supports hundreds of startups annually and hosts ecosystem events. Scope: Regional (Paris).
Partech is a global venture capital firm founded in 1982 in San Francisco and now headquartered in Paris, with additional offices in Berlin, Dakar, and San Francisco. The firm manages over EUR 2.5B across seed, venture, and growth funds, investing from EUR 200K pre-seed tickets up to EUR 50M+ growth rounds. Partech has backed over 250 companies including BlaBlaCar, Doctolib, Alan, Exotec, and Swile. The firm is one of the most active French VCs investing in Germany and Africa, and its Partech Africa fund is the largest dedicated tech VC fund on the continent.
Pasqal is a French quantum computing company founded in 2019 and spun out of the Institut d'Optique that builds quantum processors based on neutral atoms held and arranged with optical tweezers. Co-founded by researchers including Nobel laureate Alain Aspect, it develops full-stack hardware and software for applications in chemistry, finance and optimisation, and raised a 100 million euro Series B round in 2023.
Patrick Pouyanné is Chairman of the Board and CEO of TotalEnergies, one of the world's five largest integrated energy companies with operations in over 130 countries and revenues exceeding €200 billion annually. He has led TotalEnergies since 2014, steering its transition toward a multi-energy strategy encompassing LNG, solar, wind, and electricity alongside oil and gas. He is a confirmed speaker at the ONS 2026 Strategic Conference in Stavanger, Norway.
PayFit is a Paris-based fintech founded in 2016 that provides cloud payroll and HR software for small and medium-sized businesses, automating pay runs, leave, expenses and employee management across several European countries. It reached unicorn status in 2022 and serves tens of thousands of SMEs.
Pelico is a manufacturing and supply-chain orchestration platform that helps industrial operations teams identify and respond to disruptions in real time. It connects data, teams and tools across complex manufacturing operations to reduce part shortages and backlogs, cut inventory costs and improve on-time delivery. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Paris, the company counts large manufacturers among its users and raised a $40 million strategic financing round led by General Catalyst in 2025 to advance generative AI in its platform and expand in North America.
Accounting and financial management platform growing its engineering footprint in Spain. Pennylane is a startup based in Paris, France at the growth stage. The company operates in the Fintech, Accounting, SaaS space. Learn more at their website.
Co-founder and CEO of Mirakl, the marketplace and e-commerce software platform he co-founded in 2012. He scaled it into a global SaaS leader valued at over $3.5bn, backed by 83North, Permira and others.
Co-founder and CEO of papernest, the platform that automates household subscriptions and contracts. A former McKinsey consultant, he co-founded the company in 2015 and expanded it across Europe.
Photoroom is a Paris-based AI company founded in 2019 that builds photo-editing tools which automatically remove and replace image backgrounds and generate product visuals, aimed primarily at e-commerce sellers and marketers. Its app has been downloaded tens of millions of times and it trains its own generative image models. It raised a 43 million dollar Series B round in 2024 led by Balderton Capital and Aglae Ventures.
Pigment is a Paris-based enterprise planning platform founded in 2019 by Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli, both former Criteo executives. The software enables finance, revenue, and HR teams to build collaborative budgets, forecasts, and scenario models in a flexible, real-time environment that replaces rigid spreadsheet workflows. Pigment has raised over $400 million from investors including ICONIQ Growth, Meritech Capital, and Greenoaks, reaching a valuation above $1.4 billion. The platform serves customers including Figma, Deliveroo, and Webhelp. Pigment is part of a new generation of European enterprise software companies challenging legacy planning tools like Anaplan and Adaptive Planning.
Europe's leading environmental and energy technologies trade show at Eurexpo Lyon, organised by RX. Pollutec covers waste, water, energy, contaminated sites, air quality, risk prevention and the bioeconomy, connecting cleantech and greentech startups with industry, utilities and public buyers.
Poolside is arguably the most important "import" to the European AI ecosystem in the last decade. Founded by Jason Warner (former CTO of GitHub) and Eiso Kant, the company started in the United States but relocated its headquarters to Paris in 2024 to tap France's deep talent pool in mathematics, systems engineering, and AI research. Its mission is unusually ambitious: not just to build code autocomplete, but to create the world's most capable AI for software engineering, with a long-term goal of systems that can build and evolve software autonomously. This framing has made Poolside a defining player in the AI-for-developers category. By 2026, Poolside has established itself as a core node in the "Paris AI Triangle" alongside Mistral and H. After a massive $500M Series B in late 2024 led by Bain Capital Ventures, the company launched its flagship foundation model trained on a distinct corpus of code, software architecture, and repository-level structure. The emphasis on engineering artifacts rather than general internet text allows Poolside's models to reason about large codebases, infer intent from architectural patterns, and propose higher-level refactors instead of one-off snippets. This technical posture differentiates Poolside from generalist models and makes it uniquely useful for enterprises grappling with decades of technical debt. The company's 2026 platform looks less like a plugin and more like a "shadow engineering team." Poolside can analyze legacy banking systems, plan migrations across stacks, and coordinate changes across modules while preserving compliance and auditability. That capability has made it a darling of large financial institutions such as HSBC and Citi, and it explains why strategic investors are embedded alongside venture capital. Poolside is also scaling Project Horizon, a 2-gigawatt AI data center campus in Texas in partnership with CoreWeave, while keeping its research and model development anchored in Paris. This split setup reflects a broader pattern: US-scale compute, European R&D depth. Poolside's ecosystem ties are deep. It is a central node at Station F and an active participant in the Paris AI Hub, and its relocation is often cited by the French government as a proof point for attracting foreign tech leadership. The investor roster underscores its strategic importance: Bain Capital Ventures led the growth round, DST Global joined as a late-stage backer, Xavier Niel provided early strategic support to facilitate the Paris move, and Nvidia is a hardware partner. In 2026, Poolside stands out as Europe's most credible attempt to build an AI-native software engineering stack at frontier scale.
Popsink is a real-time data replication platform specialising in change data capture (CDC), enabling enterprises to extract live data from mission-critical systems — including legacy databases, mainframes, ERPs, and CRMs — and synchronise it to modern data lakes and cloud data warehouses without disrupting production operations. The platform supports multiple deployment modes including SaaS, bring-your-own-cloud, on-premise, and air-gapped environments, and holds SOC II Type 2 and ISO 27001 certifications. Popsink serves enterprise clients ranging from high-growth startups to Fortune 500 companies, including BlaBlaCar and AssoConnect.
Organiser of PRODURABLE, the largest European gathering of actors and solutions for the sustainable economy, held at the Palais des Congrès in Paris. Produced by Groupe AEF under the patronage of the French Ministry of Ecological Transition, it convenes thousands of decision-makers, speakers and partners.
Qonto is a Paris-based digital business bank founded in 2016 by Steve Anavi and Alexandre Prot to simplify financial management for SMEs and freelancers. The platform offers business accounts, corporate cards, expense management, bookkeeping integrations, and invoicing in a single interface. Qonto has raised over EUR 600 million from investors including Tiger Global, Valar Ventures, Tencent, and DST Global, reaching a valuation of EUR 5 billion. It serves over 500,000 business customers across France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and acquired German competitor Penta in 2022. Qonto is Europe's largest digital finance platform purpose-built for small businesses.
A large-scale AI leadership summit at the Carrousel du Louvre with 9,000+ attendees, 350+ speakers, and 2,000+ companies, centred on enterprise AI adoption and ROI. Useful for AI and SaaS founders targeting enterprise buyers and seeking visibility with corporate innovation teams and investors.
Co-founder and CTO of Exotec, leading the engineering behind its autonomous warehouse robots. He co-founded the company with Romain Moulin in 2015.
Gives second life to used lithium-ion EV and industrial batteries, remanufacturing them into affordable residential solar energy storage systems that let households self-consume up to 90% of their solar production.
Vulnerability-management platform built by the founders of the Paris pentest firm Mobeta. It ingests penetration-test reports from any provider and turns them into dynamic dashboards with automated re-verification scripts that confirm remediation without manual counter-audits. Available as SaaS or on-premise, compliant with NIS2, DORA and ISO 27001, hosted in France on Scaleway.
Paris-based cybersecurity startup that trains employees to recognise phishing and social-engineering threats through automated, personalised awareness campaigns and simulated phishing exercises delivered inside existing work tools. Serves over 1,000 companies across Europe and the US.
Developer conference on the French Riviera at SKEMA Business School in Sophia Antipolis: one Deep Dive day plus two conference days, 50 talks and 30 workshops for around 700 attendees across web, cloud, DevOps and AI tracks.
Riviera JUG is a volunteer-run developer community organization based in Sophia Antipolis, French Riviera, dedicated to organizing the annual Riviera DEV multi-day developer conference. The group brings together developers and technologists from across France and Europe to share knowledge on Java/JVM technologies, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and modern software engineering practices. All seventeen-plus organizers are unpaid volunteers who collectively design and run a conference that consistently draws over a hundred confirmed speakers per edition.
Develops grain-of-rice-sized microrobots designed to navigate inside the human brain to deliver therapeutic molecules, implant electrodes or collect cellular data, aiming to make neurosurgery safer and more precise for conditions including glioblastoma.
Co-founder of Bioptimus and a machine-learning scientist who previously worked at Google DeepMind and Amazon on large-scale models, now applied to biological foundation models.
Co-founder and CEO of Exotec, the warehouse-robotics company behind the Skypod system. He turned the Lille-based startup into France's first industrial-tech unicorn, serving global retailers.
Co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, leading product and engineering. He previously co-founded and served as CTO of the adtech company Criteo before starting Pigment.
Roxanne Varza is an Iranian-American tech executive and angel investor who serves as Director of Station F, the world's largest startup campus in Paris. Before leading Station F, Varza was a prominent tech journalist and community builder, working at Microsoft Ventures and TechCrunch. In her role at Station F she oversees a campus hosting over 1,000 startups and 30+ partner programs. Alongside her operational role, Varza is an active angel investor backing early-stage founders in France and across Europe, with a particular focus on diverse founders, consumer tech, and community-driven platforms. She is consistently ranked among France's most influential tech figures and frequently advises on ecosystem development.
Co-founder and CEO of GetVocal AI, building autonomous voice agents for businesses, backed by Creandum, Elaia and Speedinvest.
French arm of RX (Reed Exhibitions), a global events business that organises major trade shows in France including Pollutec, the leading environmental technology event in Lyon, and Big Data & AI Paris. RX France connects exhibitors, innovators and buyers across cleantech, data and industrial sectors.
France's leading govtech and public-sector trade show under the theme 'Boldness is local', drawing roughly 65,000 visitors and 1,380 exhibitors at Porte de Versailles across digital, energy, mobility, safety and urban-development solutions for local authorities.
The 19th edition of PRODURABLE at the Palais des Congrès in Paris is the largest European meeting for the sustainable economy, with around 15,000 visitors, 800 speakers and 350 partners. It convenes decision-makers, impact startups and investors around sustainability and ecological transition.
Co-founder and CEO of Filigran, the open-source cyber-threat-intelligence company behind OpenCTI. A former French cyber-agency leader, he scaled Filigran with backing from Insight, Accel and Eurazeo.
Major French healthcare and hospital innovation expo with a large innovation village for digital health ventures. High-value event for founders targeting public-hospital procurement and clinical pilot partnerships.
Scaleway is a European cloud provider and subsidiary of the Iliad Group, offering a full stack of cloud infrastructure including bare-metal servers, Kubernetes, object storage, managed databases, and GPU instances for AI workloads. Founded by Xavier Niel's Iliad, Scaleway positions itself as a sovereign European alternative to US hyperscalers, with data centers in Paris, Amsterdam, and Warsaw. The company is increasingly important for European organizations seeking GDPR-compliant cloud hosting.
Scalingo is a French Platform-as-a-Service startup founded in 2014 in Strasbourg, offering a developer-friendly cloud deployment platform for web applications and APIs with a focus on European data sovereignty. The platform provides one-click deployments, auto-scaling, and managed databases, serving startups and enterprises seeking reliable European cloud hosting. Scalingo participates as a Silver sponsor at Sunny Tech 2026.
Built a wearable AI-powered haptic navigation device for blind and visually impaired people: glasses-mounted cameras capture the environment, AI processes the scene and a lumbar belt of 256 solenoids produces tactile impulses mapping the surroundings. Winner of the 2024 Lépine Prize.
Shotgun is a live-events platform and ticketing solution focused on nightlife and electronic music. It provides software for venues, collectives, festivals, labels and artists to organise events, sell and manage tickets, and engage their communities, while serving as a discovery marketplace where attendees find events and buy or resell tickets. The company emerged from the Parisian underground electronic music scene and has expanded internationally, with offices beyond Paris including Marseille, Lisbon, São Paulo, New York and Miami.
SIDO Lyon is Europe's leading B2B show for IoT, AI, robotics, and XR, organised by Infopro Digital Trade Shows at the Cité Internationale de Lyon on 16–17 September 2026. The 2026 edition gathers 300+ exhibitors and around 210 speakers across some 70 conference sessions, with dedicated zones for sustainable tech (Impact by SIDO) and collaborative robotics (Innorobo by SIDO).
Singular is a Paris-based venture capital firm focused on deep tech and frontier technology investments across Europe. Founded in 2014, the firm invests from seed through growth stages in companies building breakthrough technologies in AI, quantum computing, space, robotics, and advanced materials. Singular manages several hundred million euros and has backed notable European deep tech companies. The firm differentiates itself through deep technical expertise and a network of scientific advisors that help evaluate highly technical investments.
Skello is a SaaS workforce-management platform that helps businesses build and manage employee schedules, track time and absences, and handle related HR and payroll-preparation tasks. It is widely used in shift-based sectors such as retail, hospitality, pharmacies, bakeries and gyms. The company is headquartered in Paris and raised a 40 million euro Series B round in 2021 led by Partech, with existing backers XAnge and Aglaé Ventures, to expand across Europe.
Sorare is a Paris-based fantasy sports and digital collectibles platform founded in 2018 by Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort. The platform lets users collect officially licensed digital player cards and compete in fantasy football, basketball, and baseball leagues. Sorare holds partnerships with over 300 sports organizations including the Premier League, NBA, MLB, and LaLiga. The company raised $680 million in its Series B led by SoftBank in 2021, reaching a valuation of $4.3 billion. Despite the broader NFT market downturn, Sorare has maintained its position by focusing on gaming utility rather than pure speculation. It operates from Paris with a major commercial office in London serving UK sports partnerships.
Spendesk is a Paris-based fintech founded in 2016 that provides an all-in-one spend management platform combining corporate cards, invoice and expense management, approvals and budgeting for mid-market companies. It reached unicorn status in 2022 after a funding round of more than 100 million euros and serves thousands of finance teams across Europe.
Spore.Bio is a Paris-based biotech developing AI-driven microbiology testing for the food, beverage, cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries. Its technology uses spectroscopic analysis combined with machine learning to detect, quantify and identify micro-organisms directly from a sample without traditional culturing, enrichment or staining, reducing testing time from days to minutes. The approach is intended to let manufacturers identify contamination risks quickly on or near the production line. The company raised a $23M Series A in February 2025 led by Singular, building on an earlier pre-seed round, and in January 2026 announced multi-million funding from the Google.org Fund for AI in Science.
Co-founder and CEO of Doctolib, the e-health booking and software platform he started in 2013. He scaled it into one of Europe's most valuable health-tech companies, serving hundreds of thousands of practitioners.
Co-founder and CTO of Dust and a former research engineer at OpenAI, where he worked on reasoning and formal mathematics, now building enterprise AI agents.
Restores soil health through AI-powered DNA sequencing of soil microbiomes, having built the first bacterial genome atlas for Bordeaux vineyard soils. Develops non-GMO, bacteria-based biosolutions to improve crop resilience in a changing climate.
Station F is a large startup campus in Paris housed in the restored Halle Freyssinet and launched in 2017. The campus hosts 30+ programs, including STATION F's in-house Founders Program and Fighters Program, plus corporate programs such as Meta and Microsoft GenAI Studio alongside partners like LVMH. Station F is led by Director Roxanne Varza. Startups benefit from coworking space, mentorship, events, and dedicated founder support services that make the campus a core node of the Paris ecosystem.
Co-founder and president of Qonto, which he started with Alexandre Prot after the two had earlier co-founded the price-comparison startup Smokio.
Stoïk is a Paris-based insurtech founded in 2021 that combines cyber insurance with cybersecurity software for small and medium-sized businesses. It bundles coverage with active risk-monitoring and scanning tools to help SMEs both insure against and reduce their exposure to cyber risk. The company operates across several European markets including France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Austria and Luxembourg. After a 25M euro Series B in 2024 led by Alven, Stoïk raised a 20M euro Series C in January 2026, co-led by Impala and Opera Tech Ventures, to advance its AI agents and expand across Europe.
Sunny Tech is a French non-profit volunteer association (loi 1901) comprising developers, designers, and meetup members from the Montpellier tech community. The association organizes the Sunny Tech conference, widely recognized as the first major developer-focused tech conference held in Montpellier. Each edition gathers software engineers, cloud architects, and open-source practitioners from across France for two days of technical talks, workshops, and community networking.
A two-day developer and product conference in Montpellier in its 7th edition, with around 85 sessions across five tracks. Aimed at developers, product people, and designers — a solid mid-sized event for technical founders building in the south of France.
French embedded-banking (banking-as-a-service) platform letting software companies embed accounts, cards and payments. Licensed electronic money institution authorised by the French ACPR; partnered with BNP Paribas.
Swile is a Paris-based employee benefits and fintech platform founded in 2018 by Loic Soubeyrand. The company digitizes meal vouchers, gift cards, mobility credits, and other employee perks into a single smart card and mobile app, replacing the paper-based benefits systems that remain common across France and Southern Europe. Swile raised over EUR 200 million from investors including SoftBank Vision Fund and has been valued at over EUR 1 billion. In 2022 it merged with Brazilian benefits platform Bswift to expand into Latin America. Swile is a leading force in modernizing employee experience across Europe.
First edition of an Industry 4.0 trade show at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, with 100+ exhibitors, 4,000+ visitors and 40+ conferences on industrial software, IT/OT convergence, AI, connected robotics and supply chain 4.0.
An enterprise-tech mega-event at Porte de Versailles bundling five co-located shows covering cloud and AI infrastructure, DevOps, cloud and cyber security, data and AI leadership, and data centres. For infrastructure, devtools, and security startups it is a single badge to reach enterprise IT buyers across the whole stack.
Organizer of Techinnov, France's leading structured B2B matchmaking event for industrial innovation, held near Paris since 2011. The annual conference connects over 3,000 participants including startups, SMEs, and large corporates through pre-scheduled one-on-one meetings, fostering partnerships across advanced manufacturing, energy, and deeptech.
France's flagship B2B innovation matchmaking day at Parc Floral de Paris, organized around pre-scheduled 20-minute meetings between startups and industrial buyers. Designed for high meeting density and fast enterprise business development in Industry 4.0 and industrial transformation.
Co-founder and CEO of Back Market, the refurbished-electronics marketplace he co-founded in 2014 to make second-hand devices mainstream. He scaled it into one of Europe's largest circular-economy platforms, valued at over $5bn.
Founder and CEO of Meero, the AI photography and image-processing company he started in 2016, raising large rounds from Alven, Eurazeo and Prime Ventures to automate visual content at scale.
An international space-industry summit in Toulouse, Europe's space capital, organised by Novaspace with the Occitanie region. For spacetech and deeptech founders it is a focused venue to meet space agencies, primes, and investors shaping the resilient-space agenda.
The world's leading HR and workforce technology conference and expo, organized by UNLEASH Group at the Paris Convention Center on 20-22 October 2026. Three days across seven conference stages, summits, an exhibition and startup showcases covering AI, skills, workforce strategy, reward, people analytics and the future of work, drawing thousands of senior HR leaders and HR-tech buyers.
Mobile app (Android and iOS) that rewards everyday drivers by automatically accumulating points in the background as they drive, with no manual interaction. Points are redeemable for discounts at partner merchants, and geo-discovery surfaces nearby offers along a driver's usual routes. Early-stage and recruiting its first national merchant partners.
Verkor is the industrial champion of the French "Battery Valley" and one of Europe's most important energy manufacturing plays. While many battery startups emphasize chemistry R&D, Verkor's differentiator is execution at scale. Its gigafactory in Dunkirk, which began commissioning in late 2025, is designed to reach 16 GWh of annual capacity—enough to power roughly 300,000 electric vehicles. The facility is among the most advanced battery plants in Europe, built to supply automotive OEMs with locally produced, low-carbon cells. The year 2026 is Verkor's start-of-production milestone. Its cells are the core of the new Alpine A390 and other Renault Group EV programs, giving the company a high-profile anchor customer and a direct path to volume demand. Verkor positions itself around "low-carbon performance" by combining France's low-emission nuclear grid with a highly digitized Industry 4.0 production system that reduces scrap rates and energy intensity. The company argues that its batteries carry a materially smaller carbon footprint than cells manufactured in coal-heavy regions, which is increasingly important as automakers track embedded emissions across supply chains. Beyond production, Verkor is investing in future chemistry and process innovation. The Verkor Innovation Centre (VIC) in Grenoble is expanding its work on next-generation chemistries, including sodium-ion cells that reduce reliance on lithium and cobalt. This R&D focus strengthens supply-chain resilience and creates optionality for lower-cost, lower-risk storage solutions as electric mobility scales. Verkor's roadmap also includes tighter integration between materials sourcing, cell design, and recycling, positioning it to meet Europe's stringent regulatory requirements on battery sustainability and traceability. Verkor is backed by a mix of strategic and infrastructure capital. Macquarie Asset Management and Meridiam provide long-term project finance muscle, Renault Group anchors demand and industrial validation, EQT Ventures provides growth capital, and Sibanye-Stillwater supports raw material security. It was co-founded and supported early by EIT InnoEnergy and has strong operational ties to Schneider Electric, which helped design its digital factory systems. With support from the Macron administration and the European Investment Bank, Verkor has become a poster child for European industrial sovereignty. In 2026, it stands as proof that Europe can manufacture critical clean-tech hardware at global scale—and do it with a lower-carbon footprint.
Luxury fashion resale platform with strong operations and authentication teams in Spain. Vestiaire Collective is a startup based in Paris, France at the growth stage. The company operates in the Marketplace, Fashion, Circular Economy space. Learn more at their website.
Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Back Market, shaping the brand and product behind the refurbished-electronics marketplace he started with Thibaud Hug de Larauze and Quentin Le Brouster.
Victor Decrion is Managing Partner at Lauxera Capital Partners, a European venture capital firm specializing in cardiovascular disease therapeutics and cardiometabolic drug development. He is a notable life science investor active in the European and Nordic biotech partnering ecosystem. Lauxera Capital is recognized for its focused thesis in cardiovascular innovation, an underserved area in European life science VC.
Co-founder and CEO of Malt, the freelance marketplace connecting companies with independent professionals across Europe. He scaled it into the continent's leading freelancing platform.
Organizer of VivaTech, Paris's flagship innovation and startup conference connecting founders, corporates, and investors since 2016. One of Europe's largest tech events, VivaTech attracts over 150,000 attendees and 13,000 startups annually, featuring startup challenges, corporate open innovation programs, and high-profile keynotes.
Europe's largest startup and technology event at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, marking its 10th anniversary in 2026. Core value for founders is open-innovation deal flow with corporates and investors. Startup Challenge applications typically run on rolling tracks and often close in late March to early April 2026 depending on partner challenge.
Challenge-based corporate innovation tracks connected to VivaTech 2026. Deadlines are rolling and usually close between late March and early April 2026 depending on partner challenge. Selected startups can receive exhibition visibility, pilot opportunities, and enterprise integration support.
AI-powered invoicing SaaS for freelancers and tradespeople that generates compliant PDF invoices in under 10 seconds from voice or text messages on WhatsApp, handling French requirements including sequential numbering, VAT and the 2026 e-invoicing mandate.
Founded 2001. Multi-sector accelerator helping early-stage tech startups reach first customers and EUR 1M ARR within 3 years. KPI-driven programs, zero-equity loans, and coaching; portfolio has 50+ exits. Scope: Regional (Ile-de-France).
Large-scale AI conference at the Palais des Festivals with 10,000+ attendees, 320 speakers, and 220+ exhibitors expected for 2026. Program tracks include AI for Business, AI Governance, and Health AI, making it a high-value venue for founders seeking enterprise pilots and investor visibility.
XAnge is a French-German early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2003, with offices in Paris, Berlin, and Munich. Part of the Siparex Group, XAnge manages over EUR 600M and invests EUR 1-10M at seed and Series A in deep tech, impact, and digital transformation. The firm is particularly active along the Franco-German corridor and has backed companies including Lydia, Akeneo, Talend, and Studitemps. XAnge differentiates with a strong focus on sustainability and B2B software, and its bi-national positioning helps portfolio companies expand between France and the DACH region.
Xavier Niel is one of Europe's most influential tech billionaires and prolific angel investors. As the founder of Free (Iliad Group), France's disruptive telecom operator, Niel built a fortune that he has systematically reinvested into the startup ecosystem. Through Kima Ventures (listed separately as VC), he backs roughly 100 startups per year, but Niel also makes substantial personal angel investments in strategic companies. He founded Station F, the world's largest startup campus in Paris, and created 42, a tuition-free coding school with campuses worldwide. His personal angel portfolio spans hundreds of companies across fintech, AI, deep tech, and consumer internet, making him arguably the single most important individual supporter of the French tech ecosystem.
Partner at Heartcore Capital, based in Paris, who joined from Goldman Sachs in 2013. He leads investments in consumer technology and marketplaces across France and Southern Europe.
Zefir is a French proptech company operating an AI-powered real-estate marketplace that aims to accelerate residential property transactions for sellers, buyers and agents. Its technology pools listings across competing agents and helps reduce transaction times, and it has launched ZIA, an AI-powered home-search assistant for buyers. Founded in 2020 and based in Paris, Zefir raised a 15 million euro Series B round in September 2025 led by FinTech Collective, bringing total funding to roughly 50 million euro.