France
The latest startup and technology news coming out of France.
900.care sells waterless personal care products and lets you add tap water at home
Here’s the harsh truth behind personal care products: You’re mostly buying water and plastic. The main ingredient in a bottle of shampoo or shower gel is water, which is then…
Pelikan Mobility is building a software-enabled commercial EV leasing solution
Chances are you may have noticed that many commercial vehicles are now electric vehicles — think delivery vans, telecom minivans, utility maintenance trucks, and so on. But there are still…
Google hit with $270M fine in France as authority finds news publishers’ data was used for Gemini
In a never-ending saga between Google and France’s competition authority over copyright protections for news snippets, the Autorité de la Concurrence announced a €250 million fine against the tech giant…
Lago, a Paris-based open source billing platform, banks $22M
A startup out of Paris that began life building marketing tools has raised $22 million after making a successful pivot into billing — a space it discovered was even more…
As European dynamism gathers momentum, Elaia and partners double down with new deep tech fund
Elaia’s third deep tech seed fund, DTS3, is double the size of the two previous funds, and signals the momentum that is forming around an emerging concept: European dynamism.
Kolet is a new French startup created by four experienced co-founders in the French tech ecosystem who want to make it easier to stay connected when you travel. The company…
French startup Nijta hopes to protect voice privacy in AI use cases
France-based startup Nijta, whose flagship product Voice Harbor anonymizes voices for AI, raised €2 million in funding from various sources, including deep tech VC fund Elaia.
Zama’s homomorphic encryption tech lands it $73M on a valuation of nearly $400M
Homomorphic encryption, a complex technique that uses cryptographic algorithms to keep data secure as it travels around networks and to third parties, continues to elude mass-market scalability and thus adoption…
While many entrepreneurs are currently facing the harsh reality of a VC funding crunch, Qonto isn’t one of them. The Paris-based business banking startup still has hundreds of millions of…
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NFT fantasy sports startup Sorare lays off 13% of staff as web3 gaming continues to sputter
Web3-enabled fantasy sports platform Sorare laid off 22 employees based in its New York office in February. The move comes as the startup wants certain teams to be concentrated at the company’s Paris headquarters to improve communication and efficiency, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. “As we plan…
Catalog is building the B2B commerce platform for small companies
When you think about commerce platforms, chances are the first names that come to mind are big names like Adobe Commerce or Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Large companies processing millions of…
Vibe helps small companies buy video ads on streaming services
As streaming apps and services are gradually showing more ads to viewers, adtech startup Vibe plans to help small businesses take advantage of that trend by letting them access that…
OpenCTI maker Filigran raises $16M for its cybersecurity threat management suite
Paris-based cybersecurity startup Filigran is capitalizing on the success of OpenCTI to build a suite of open source threat management products. That’s why the company recently raised €15 million (around…
Yesterday, Mistral AI, a Paris-based AI startup working on foundational models, announced a new large language model that could rival OpenAI’s GPT-4, a chat assistant and a distribution partnership with…
Mistral AI releases new model to rival GPT-4 and its own chat assistant
Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is gradually building an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic as its latest announcement shows. The company is launching a new flagship large language model called…
Consolidation continues in micromobility as Cooltra snaps up Cityscoot
Paris’ commercial court has accepted Cooltra’s offer to acquire Cityscoot. These two companies provide shared electric mopeds that you can unlock and ride to go from one place to another.…
Bioptimus raises $35 million seed round to develop AI foundational model focused on biology
There’s a new generative AI startup based in Paris. But what makes Bioptimus interesting is that it plans to apply everything we’ve collectively learned about AI models over the past…
Planity raises $48 million because even hair salons need their own SaaS product
If you’ve ever traveled in rural areas in France, you may have realized a French peculiarity. Even in the seemingly less-populated towns, there’s a hair salon. French startup Planity has…
Google’s new AI hub in Paris proves that Google feels insecure about AI
This morning, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai inaugurated a new hub in Paris dedicated to artificial intelligence. This hub is located in a newly renovated building near Google’s main office in…
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How a French health insurance unicorn plans to leverage AI to reach profitability
Alan’s meteoric rise in the French tech ecosystem has been both figurative and literal. A few years ago, the startup’s office was limited to one floor in a nondescript office building near the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Over time, the company added another floor, then another floor — now the…
Memorizer is a movie and book tracking app that also helps you find inspiration
There are quite a few apps that let you log the movies, TV shows and books that you have watched and read. Some of them are indie apps that take…
Accounting software startup Pennylane becomes France’s latest unicorn
Just like clockwork, Pennylane is raising another €40 million ($43 million at today’s exchange rate). This new funding round comes after the accounting startup raised €4 million in 2020, €15…
It’s not every day that a new VC firm comes out of stealth. This time, Varsity is announcing its first fund. Founded by a former Société Générale executive and two…
Guided Energy helps EV fleet managers optimize battery charging
Imagine you work for a car rental agency or a package delivery company and you’re in charge of a fleet of vehicles. If you’re switching to EV vehicles, it becomes…
Naboo provides an Airbnb-like experience for company seminars
Naboo, a French company that was created just a couple of years ago, is trying to create a modern online experience for company seminar planning. The startup recently raised an…
Probabl is a new AI company built around popular library scikit-learn
Probabl isn’t your average AI startup, as this new French company is an Inria spin-off company that revolves around an open source data science library called scikit-learn — Inria is…
Twin Labs automates repetitive tasks by letting AI take over your mouse cursor
Meet Twin Labs, a Paris-based startup that wants to build an automation product for repetitive tasks, such as onboarding new employees to all your internal services, reordering items when you’re…
Startup studio Hexa hires former Doctolib exec to launch its health vertical
Hexa, the Paris-based startup studio that recently raised $22 million, is launching a new vertical focused on improving the healthcare system. Julien Méraud, a senior team member of the French…
Luko’s acquisition won’t make everyone happy, but the insurtech will live on
Allianz Direct, a digital-first German subsidiary of the insurance giant, has acquired the French home insurance business of ailing insurtech Luko for €4.3 million (around $4.65 million).
French regulator fines Amazon $35M over its surveillance system of warehouse workers
France’s data privacy watchdog, the CNIL, has fined Amazon’s logistics subsidiary in France €32 million, or $35 million at today’s exchange rate. The CNIL says that Amazon France Logistique has…
