The launch of ChatGPT marked the start of a fierce race in the generative AI sector, that is, capable of creating textual, audio, visual content or even lines of code. And if the United States is currently in the lead, France is gradually establishing itself as a European champion in the sector. Here are 7 of the most promising young companies in France.
Mistral AI
It is impossible to start this ranking without mentioning Mistral AI, the leader in generative AI on the Old Continent. Founded in 2023, the startup has established itself, in just one year, as one of the world leaders in the industry. Its co-founders, Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, previously worked at DeepMind and Meta.
Its large language models (LLM) are open source. This means that they are made available to the public to be used, modified and distributed freely. An approach that differentiates the firm from its rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, and which attracts investors.
Because Mistral AI has experienced a meteoric rise. The company acquired unicorn status in December 2023, just a few months after its founding. Last June, it completed a funding round worth 600 million euros, bringing its total valuation to 6 billion euros. It also established a strategic partnership with Microsoft, allowing it to enter the American market.
H Company
H Company (H for Holistic) is also considered a true French flagship of generative AI. Four of its five co-founders also moved to DeepMind.
The company develops models that aim to improve worker productivity and automate business tasks. They can be considered “AI agents” because they are capable of breaking down complex tasks into several subtasks. Likewise, they are designed to reason and plan, allowing them to approach problems like humans do.
The startup raised $220 million in May from renowned French and international investors.
Dust
Dust, founded in 2023 by Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu, also develops solutions for businesses. Its strong point: specialized AI assistants, directly linked to its clients’ data and documents. They are primarily intended for sectors such as human resources, engineering, customer relations and sales.
Note that the startup does not create its own language models, but offers integrations with those of leading companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and Google. This flexibility allows businesses to choose the model best suited to their specific needs, while ensuring that assistants are continually updated with the latest advances in AI.
Proof of the enthusiasm generated by its product, Dust raised $16 million during a Series A round in June and led by Sequoia Capital, the American venture capital juggernaut.
LightOn
LightOn stands out because it recently became the first European company specializing in generative AI to go public, at Euronext Paris more precisely. An operation which values it at 60 million euros.
It is developing two flagship products aimed at businesses. Forge allows them to develop models adapted to their needs, while Paradigm constitutes itself as an all-in-one generative AI platform, offering the possibility of industrializing AI projects and demonstrating their value with a quantifiable return on investment.
This tool is very appropriate for the current ecosystem, when many companies want to adopt the technology but struggle to find specific and profitable use cases.
Poolside
Poolside also stands out as an ultra-promising player in generative AI. Founded in 2023 by two experienced engineers, it specifically targets developers. At the seed stage, the young company has not yet marketed a product, but its demonstrations are already acclaimed.
It assures that its large language models will be more efficient in the field of code than those of the competition, because they can be trained on the proprietary data of client companies. Likewise, its assistant will allow developers to quickly create and test code using natural language prompts.
Poolside is already generating a lot of attention, with a monumental funding round of $500 million completed at the beginning of October.
Giskard
Founded in 2021 by Alex Combessie and Jean-Marie John-Mathews, Giskard differs from many startups in the generative AI sector. It aims to address the challenges associated with the deployment of technology.
Its objective: to ensure the quality, security and compliance of artificial intelligence (AI) models, with a platform designed for professionals in the sector, allowing them to test them. It can be directly integrated into their development processes.
Giskard’s activity is all the more relevant as AI regulation is gradually taking shape around the world, and more particularly in Europe with the AI Act.
Its tools will allow companies to test their models so that they comply with the new standards. Moreover, the young company received a strategic investment of 3 million euros from the European Commission to develop its SaaS platform.
Photoroom
This is the alternative to Photoshop made in France. Photoroom was founded in 2019 by Matthieu Rouif and Eliot Andres, and offers a tool powered by deep learning algorithms for editing images. Enough to offer an immense amount of possibilities for content creators and merchants, its main customers.
The application allows, for example, to remove or modify backgrounds, add objects to a photo or generate backgrounds completely automatically, using a simple text query. The success is such that Photoroom has established itself as an international benchmark: the platform has more than 150 million downloads and 30 million active users worldwide. Its valuation is estimated at $500 million.
