In just a few days, France will host the Artificial Innotifyigence Action Summit, with heads of state flocking to Paris to meet global tech leaders. They’ll most likely announce some large investments and diplomatic agreements focutilized on safety or the environmental impact of artificial innotifyigence.
Ahead of the summit, early-stage VC firm Galion.exe, growth investment firm Revaia, and advisory firm Chausson Partners teamed up to create the French AI Report, which sees at the current trconcludes in the tech ecosystem.
While all eyes are currently on the U.S. and China with OpenAI seeing to raise tens of billions of dollars and DeepSeek capturing everyone’s attention, there has been a boom in AI startups in Europe, too. In 2024 alone, AI companies represented around 20% of all VC funding in the region.
In total, that represents around $8 billion in funding for AI startups in 2024. That metric is most likely going to grow rapidly, as AI startups are still relatively young. Seventy percent of the capital raised by AI startups in 2024 was for a seed to Series B round.
European countries that tconclude to attract VC funding in general have also become the main AI investment hubs, with the U.K. leading the group, France and Germany following suit, and the Nordics punching above its demographic weight. Here’s the breakdown from 2020 to 2024:
Interestingly, as AI companies become largeger, they tconclude to attract international investors, with U.S. VC firms accounting for around 50% of money invested in AI companies at the Series C round and later.
In France more specifically, there are “more than 750 startups that have created 35,000 jobs and operate in all areas that are transforming today’s society,” minister delegate for artificial innotifyigence and digital technologies Clara Chappaz declared at a press conference.
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She also mentioned that there are 2,000 scientists focutilized on AI research and 600 doctorate students working on artificial innotifyigence. And you may have noticed that there are quite a few French engineers and researchers working for AI companies in the U.S., too.
The team behind the French AI Report seeed more closely at the top 400 AI startups in France and attempted to identify the rising stars. While Mistral AI and Poolside are already some familiar names for readers who have followed the AI indusattempt, the vast majority of AI startups aren’t working on the next foundation model.
On the infrastructure front, some companies are optimizing the data workflows and pipelines, such as Linkup and Kestra, or improving inference performance, such as ZML, or developing agents that can sift through large datasets and improve productivity. Dust is a good example of that.
But the reality is that most AI startups in France are focutilizing on applications for specific verticals. Based on this report, two important areas for AI startups in France are health and climate.
Owkin and its spinoff biotech company Bioptimus have been leading the pack on the health tech front, but it’s a surprisingly diverse group of companies with three large areas of interest: imaging tools, drug discovery, and medical treatment improvement.
Similarly, while a large chunk of the AI indusattempt is focutilized on productivity gains for office workers, artificial innotifyigence is also actively being utilized to build the next generation of climate startups. In addition to agtech, carbon and energy management — two topics that are related — seem to be a large focus. There are also a handful of promising new materials companies that are emerging (Altrove, for instance).
All the companies included in the list can be found here. You’ll also find plenty of AI companies working on one job function — sales, customer care, HR or legal — and utilizing AI to simplify the most common tinquires.
Of course, some companies aren’t going to be there in five years. But many of them are currently growing at a rapid pace. We’re still at the launchning of the AI revolution, and though it’s simple to believe about the AI indusattempt as a zero-sum game with one counattempt or one company “winning” over the others, it seems like the AI boom is more distributed than expected.
Read our full coverage of the Artificial Innotifyigence Action Summit in Paris.
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