The hottest startups in Paris in 2024

In the past two years, the French capital has been in the throes of AI fever and launched some of Europe’s most talked-about startups, including Mistral, which is currently valued at $6.2bn (£4.7bn). This is partly due to the support the industry has received. President Emmanuel Macron has given strong political support to French AI startups, while telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel has provided plenty of investment and the will to fund the national ambition. In September 2023 Niel invested 200 million euros ($212 million), splitting that money between funding for startups like Mistral, an artificial intelligence research lab called Kyutai, and a cloud supercomputer powered by Nvidia. “I’m the old guy who likes entrepreneurs, and the idea has always been the same: how can we help that talent stay here, building companies,” Neal says.

Niel, a prolific French businessman who owns the telecommunications company Iliad, believes that European AI companies now have a unique opportunity to act. “If you want to build a search engine now from scratch, you can’t win because you weren’t there 25 years ago. It’s exactly the same with artificial intelligence,” he says. To compete with the US, Europe needs to move fast. “[Or] at the end of the day we will be the best place in the world for museums – that’s good, but maybe we can try to do something a little different.”

Mistral

Almost every European country has a startup struggling to compete with OpenAI. Yet few have as serious a claim as the Mistral. To date, the company has raised €1 billion ($1.11 billion), including a €15 million ($16 million) investment from Microsoft. Since launching in April 2023, its three co-founders, CEO Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample have orchestrated the startup to release 12 models, including its flagship multilingual text generation model, the Mistral Large. With 27 million downloads from public repositories, Mistral’s customers (such as telco Orange and Hugging Face) use the startup’s models to customize promotional messages or power their own virtual assistants. Mistral’s free-to-use chatbot, Le Chat, functions much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is designed to give the public a way to experiment with Mistral’s open source technology. “We’re promoting open source as the only way to make technology faster and safer because there’s more control over it,” CEO Mensch told CNBC in a rare interview, adding that Europe is at a turning point in its race to compete with technological superpowers. “We have the will and we will do it,” he insists. mistral.ai

Washing

Companies that ignore sustainability face two main risks: regulation and reputation. That’s according to Rachel Delacour, CEO of Sweep, who co-founded the sustainability-focused data management platform in 2020. along with Yannick Chase and Rafael Guler. “Every company out there needs to move to a low-carbon economy,” she says, adding that it’s now a competitive advantage for businesses to be able to track sustainability goals in their operations. “Eventually your customers, your employees, your supply chain will ask what you’re doing.” The startup already works with hundreds of customers, including L’Oréal and British energy group SSE, who license the company’s platform to bring together data from across their supply chain and identify their weaknesses in terms of sustainability. A customer making hand-washable water bottles, for example, could see how much more water-efficient their product would be if customers could clean them in a dishwasher, Delacour says. This year, the startup is focusing on expanding into the US after raising a total of $100m (£76m), with investment from Tony Fadell, the creator of the iPod. sweep.net

Dust

Dust is another lively startup based in Paris. Started by co-founders Gabriel Hubert and OpenAI alumni Stanislas Polu in 2023, Dust builds custom AI bots for companies. So far, most of his clients, which include 500 teams at companies like PennyLane and Watershed, are experiencing rapid growth but don’t yet have robust processes in place. That means teams are more likely to be empowered to build a dedicated content writer or AI assistant for a feedback analyst themselves, Hubert says. Armed with €20 million ($22 million) in funding, the idea behind the startup is that office workers don’t just need a multi-functional AI assistant; instead, they need a series of highly specialized models to choose from to perform different tasks. “That level of customization is really what gives them a report when they need it, a [spreadsheet] when they need it, or an executable interactive graphic,” Hubert says. powder.tt

h

When news broke that a group of engineers who worked on advanced models at Google’s artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, were preparing to launch their own company in early 2024, investors scrambled to lend their support. Originally known as Holistic AI, the company changed its name to H in May 2024. It has already secured $220m (£152m) in investment, including from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Xavier Neill and venture capital firm Accel. While it’s unclear whether the company has customers — or even products — its elusive co-founder and CEO Charles Cantor (a former resident at Stanford University) has promised that his team is developing a “complete” artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that would ” increase worker productivity’. So far, little is known about H’s mission, although the reputation of its co-founders, DeepMind scientists Laurent Sifre and Carl Tuiles, both considered leaders in their field, means there is great excitement to find out. hcompany.ai

Bioptimus

Within five months of founding Bioptimus, the company’s six co-founders launched the world’s largest open-source model for cancer detection. Trained on hundreds of millions of images, H-optimus-0 identifies cancer cells and genetic abnormalities in tumors, says co-founder and principal investigator Zelda Mariette. For her, this is just the beginning. Current models are really good at doing very focused tasks like analyzing images of cancerous tissues, she says. But Mariette wants Bioptimus to build a model that can also analyze a patient’s DNA, cells and tissue to understand how they are all connected. The company is currently still in the exploratory phase after raising $35m (£26.6m) from investors including French bank Bpifrance and telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel. bioptimus.com

Electra

The European Commission predicts that at least 30 million electric cars will be on European roads by 2030, and EV charging startup Electra is preparing for that moment by aiming to deploy 2,500 ultra-fast charging points by that date. Since its launch in 2020. it reached 300 sites across Europe – each with six charging points – including Paris, Brussels and Pisa. The idea is to make EV driving seamless and hassle-free. Drivers use Electra’s app to reserve charging spots in advance with charging sites that automatically recognize regular users. “What Tesla did with cars is what we’re trying to do with infrastructure,” says Aurelien de Mau, CEO and one of the three co-founders, along with Augustin Derville and Julien Béliateau. So far, Electra’s attractive charging stations have enabled more than 1 million 20-minute charging sessions, with French consumers paying between €0.39 and €0.52 per kWh. The company has raised 304 million euros ($338 million), including from investment group Eurazeo and French bank Bpifrance. go-electra.com

Amo

Amo is the latest French startup trying to reinvent social media. The company is led by CEO Antoine Martin, who sold his last social media business, Zenly, to Snap in 2017. for over $200 million (£152 million). From its launch in 2023. Amo launched three separate social media apps designed to refocus online relationships with friends instead of influencers: Tilt (two-way video), Bump (for location sharing), and ID (collaborative mood boards). Amo has already raised 18 million euros ($19.9 million) from investors including VC New Wave, which also backed Paris-based social media startup BeReal before it was acquired by app publisher Voodoo. amo.co

Spore.Bio

After years spent as an engineer at Nestlé, Amine Raji became disillusioned with the outdated technology used by the food industry to detect bacteria. “That’s why you have so many food recalls and sanitation outbreaks,” he says, adding that 420,000 people die each year from foodborne illness. In an effort to put an end to this, the three co-founders behind Spore.Bio – Raji, Maxim Mistretta and Mohamed Tazi – created the Vision device to identify bacteria in seconds. It works by shining light on the bacteria (a practice called biophotonics) so that machine learning algorithms can identify what type of bacteria is present by studying its response. From its launch in January 2023. five food factories use the prototype, paying a fixed monthly fee for the hardware. The company has raised 8 million euros ($8.8 million) from investors including Mehdi Ghissassi of Google DeepMind and venture capital firm LocalGlobe. spores.bio