🇫🇷 French Tech Updates — 2024 Funding Recap

Welcome to French Tech Updates! Your weekly source of startup, VC, and tech news and insights. I’m James, a startup-obsessed American living in Paris.

Looking back on 2024 🎉

In 2024, French Tech Update covered over 250 French startups that raised new rounds of funding. To close out the year, I’ve compiled all of these startups into one subscriber-exclusive database which you can access below. For each startup, you’ll find:

• 🙋🏼 Their name

• ✍️ A short description of their business

• 🤑 The amount they raised

• 📊 And their industry

While consolidating this data some interesting trends emerged. Artificial Intelligence companies absolutely dominated in 2024 (ok, that’s not so surprising) but so did Electric Vehicle Charging thanks largely to a €304M mega-round for charging network developer Electra. Companies in other asset intensive businesses like real estate, automotive manufacturing, and energy were also amongst the largest individual rounds in 2024.

A €50M round for cryptocurrency market maker Flowdesk bringing cryptocurrency to the top industries for the year was, admittedly, not something I expected.

I was also surprised by the industries that didn’t show up at the top of the list. Aside from a single €85M round for space defense startup Unseenlabs, defense was largely absent from any VC-backed rounds in France. Biotech, while attracting the 7th highest combined funding of any industry, didn’t have any single company raise more than €35M and thus didn’t crack the top individual fundraisers list for the year.

I spend a lot of time in the weeds with startups so this recap was also a good way to pull back and look at the larger trends behind the French tech landscape. Here are the 4 trends that stood out:

1. 🌊 The big wave of AI is hiding other smaller, but no less important waves: while there are certainly exciting developments for founders and investors in artificial intelligence AI is also generating a lot of noise. The volume of AI news is drowning out other stories—which means there are hidden opportunities for anyone looking for them. I see defense, electrification, and mobility as three areas that fit criteria, but there are certainly many more.

2.  🔜 Look for second order industries: A few decades ago, personal computers spawned all kinds of complementary products that grew into their own multi-billion dollar industries (mice and keyboards, processors, printers, monitors, external storage just to name a few). This year I wrote about nuclear energy’s revival as a solution for the enormous power demands created by AI and data centers. This kind of second order benefit will continue generating potential businesses options for founders and investors. Electric charging infrastructure and mobility are two promising and well-funded industries that will also need complementary products to support their growth.

3. 💁‍♂️ Founders should be prepared to do more with less: Round sizes have largely split into small or gigantic, with the gigantic deals mostly showing up in AI and infrastructure intensive industries. Even for sectors like Fintech, which had the 11th highest overall funding with €150M invested, no individual round cracked the top 11 deals overall. Smaller rounds means founders need to squeeze more productivity out of less capital. No doubt investors will also expect AI to play a role here, whether from automating customer support to cut back on spending or in speeding up product development.

4. 🏗️ VCs are backing infrastructure intensive industries, but should they be? Comparing Europe to the US is often oversimplified, but it’s hard not to do it. One important difference in this comparison is how much more capital is available from private sources in the US. In 2024, European VCs sank a lot of Euros into capital intensive projects like Northvolt. France was no exception, which is why companies like HysetCo pulled some of the highest funding rounds of the year. I’m not convinced this is the best move. With less capital to deploy, VCs in France would likely see more benefit from backing these projects earlier on and then leaving later rounds to government sources or traditional debt deals.

Anyway, check out the data for yourself, let me know what you find interesting or surprising, and I’ll see you next in 2025!