The Hottest Startups in Paris in 2024

By Morgan Meaker. WIRED. Oct 14, 2024.

The French capital has become the home of Europe’s growing AI industry—but alongside giants like Mistral are startups building EV charging infrastructure and trying to revolutionize social media.

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

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

Mistral

In almost every European country, there is a startup vying to rival OpenAI. Yet few make a claim as serious as 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 cofounders, CEO Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix, and Guillaume Lample have marshaled the startup to release 12 models, including its flagship multi-language text-generation model, Mistral Large. With 27 million downloads from public repositories, Mistral’s clients (such as telecoms company Orange, and Hugging Face) use the startup’s models to personalize 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’ve been promoting open source as the one way to make the technology go faster and be safer because there’s more scrutiny on it,” CEO Mensch told CNBC in a rare interview, adding that Europe is at a turning point in its race to compete with tech superpowers. “We have willpower and we’ll make it happen,” he insists.

Sweep

Companies that neglect sustainability are facing two major risks: regulation and reputation. That’s according to Rachel Delacour, CEO of Sweep, who cofounded the sustainability-focused data management platform in 2020 alongside Yannick Chaze and Raphael Güller. “Every company out there must transition to the low-carbon economy,” she says, adding it’s now a competitive advantage for a business to be able to track sustainability targets across their operations. “Eventually your customers, your employees, your supply chain will ask what you are doing.” The startup is already working with hundreds of clients, including L’Oréal and UK energy group SSE, which license the company’s platform in order to pool data from across their entire supply chain and identify their sustainability weak spots. A client manufacturing water bottles that must be hand-washed, for example, would be able to see how much more water-efficient its product would be if customers could clean them in the dishwasher, says Delacour. This year the startup is focused on expanding to the US after raising a total of $100 million, with investment from Tony Fadell, creator of the iPod.

Dust

Dust is yet another buzzy Paris

Episode 3084 - October 20 - Tiếng Anh - Những công ty khởi nghiệp hot nhất Paris năm 2024 - Vina Technology at AI time

Vina Technology at AI time - Công nghệ Việt Nam thời AI

Episode 3084 - October 20 - Tiếng Anh - Những công ty khởi nghiệp hot nhất Paris năm 2024 - Vina Technology at AI time