In just a few days, France shall be the host The peak of artificial intelligence motionwith the heads of the state coming to Paris to fulfill global leaders of technologies. They will almost definitely announce some large investments and diplomatic contracts focusing on the security or impact of artificial intelligence on the environment.
Before the summit, early VC company Galion.exeInvestment company growth Revaiaand advisory company Chausson Partners He joined forces to create French AI reportwhich looks at current trends in the technological ecosystem.
While all eyes are currently in the USA and China, and Opeli wants to gather tens of billions of dollars and Deepseek, which attracted everyone’s attention, there was also a boom in AI startups in Europe. Only in 2024, AI corporations accounted for about 20% of all VC financing in the region.
In total, this accounts for about $ 8 billion in financing AI startups in 2024. This record will almost definitely increase rapidly, because AI startups are still relatively young. Seventy percent of the capital collected by the start -ups AI in 2024 was the sustainable to the round of series B.
European countries, which generally attract VC financing, have also turn out to be the essential AI investment centers, with the United Kingdom managing the group, France and Germany following it, and Nordics exceed the demographic weight. Here is a failure from 2020 to 2024:
Interestingly, because AI corporations are becoming larger, they have a tendency to draw international investors, and American VC corporations constitute about 50% of the money invested in AI in the Ci series C and later.
More precisely in France, “over 750 startups that have created 35,000 jobs and operate in all areas that transform today’s society,” said the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies Clara Chappaz at a press conference.
She also mentioned that 2,000 scientists are focused on AI research, and 600 doctoral students working on artificial intelligence. Perhaps you noticed that there are many French engineers and researchers in the United States.
The team behind the French Artificial Intelligence Report looked closer to 400 Starts -AI in France and tried to discover rising stars. While Mistral Ai and Baseside are already some known names for readers who followed the AI industry, the overwhelming majority of AI startups are not working on the next foundation model.
On the infrastructure front, some corporations optimize data flows and pipelines, corresponding to Linkup and Kestra, or improves application performance corresponding to MMLor developing agents that may sift large data sets and improve performance. Dust is a good example.
But in fact, most AI startups in France focus on applications for specific divisions. Based on this report, two essential areas of AI startups in France are health and atmosphere.
Owkin and her spin-off biotechnological biotechnological Bioptimus run a package on the front of health technology, but this is a surprisingly diverse group of corporations with three large areas of interest: tools for imaging, discovering drugs and improving treatment.
Similarly, while a large a part of the AI industry focuses on the advantages of office employees, artificial intelligence is also actively used to build a latest generation climate start-ups. In addition to managing Agritech, Carbon and Energy – two related topics – they appear to be a great interest. There are also several promising latest material corporations (for example Altrove).
All corporations contained on the list You can find here. You will even find many AI corporations working on one work function – sales, customer support, HR or legal – and using artificial intelligence to simplify the commonest tasks.
Of course, some corporations won’t be there in five years. But many of them are currently growing at a fast pace. We are still at the starting of the AI revolution and although it is easy to think about the AI industry as a game of zero with one country or one company “win” over others, it appears that evidently AI boom is more distributed than expected.