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.

What’s new this week in 🇫🇷

🤖 OpenAI names Emmanuel Marill as its first EMEA Head, based in Paris

OpenAI appointed Emmanuel Marill (formerly Airbnb's Europe chief) as Managing Director for the EMEA region. Marill will be based in Paris for his newly created role reporting directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. Between this hire, the Hexa partnership, and the Station F residency, OpenAI is investing into a France during a tense period with EU AI Act compliance pressure rising and European sovereign AI discussions gaining momentum seemingly every week.

🚌 BlaBlaCar shuts down its long-distance bus service and hands FlixBus a national monopoly

BlaBlaCar announced it will close BlaBlaCar Bus by January 2027 after years of "recurring and significant operating losses" with no realistic path to reversal and will cut approximately 40 jobs as part of the change. Despite record ridership, the economics never worked and growing operational costs, a price-competitive market, and an inability to match FlixBus's scale made the bus business structurally unprofitable. With BlaBlaCar exiting the market FlixBus will become the sole national long-distance coach operator in France.

🛡️ Airbus acquires Quarkslab, its second cybersecurity deal in a month 

One month after buying UK firm Ultra Cyber Ltd, Airbus acquired Quarkslab, a 100-person Paris and Rennes firm whose QShield product protects aerospace, defense, and communications software from AI-powered reverse engineering and code injection attacks. Deal terms were not disclosed and approval is pending social partner consultation and regulatory sign-off. As satellites, drones, aircraft, and military communications networks become increasingly networked and increasingly targeted these two security acquisitions in 30 days suggest Airbus has concluded that internal cybersecurity capabilities need an external acceleration to keep up with rising threats.

🚕 Uber makes its first investment in a French company backing hydrogen taxi operator HysetCo

Uber extended a convertible loan to HysetCo, France's largest hydrogen mobility operator, marking the ride sharing giant’s first ever investment in a French company. HysetCo operates 800+ vehicles which have collectively logged 90 million emission-free kilometers since 2021. The partnership aims to boost hydrogen vehicles to represent one in five Uber Business Taxi cars by year-end or 5,000 hydrogen taxis over five years. HysetCo's existing backers include Air Liquide, TotalEnergies, Toyota, and Hy24 with Uber now adding commercial distribution at scale.

💹 Three years after founding Fintool, Nicolas Bustamante sells to Microsoft

Three years after founding Fintool in San Francisco, French entrepreneur Nicolas Bustamante announced the company's acquisition by Microsoft for an undisclosed amount. The business, which was co-founded with ex-Apple engineer Édouard Godfrey, builds AI agents embedded directly in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint that let investment banks, hedge funds, and asset managers automate financial workflows. Bustamante previously built and sold Doctrine in 2023.

🤝 Hexa partners with OpenAI to give its startup studio entrepreneurs model access

Paris-based startup studio Hexa announced an exclusive partnership with OpenAI under which its founders will receive API credits, quarterly technical roadmap briefings, dedicated engineering support, and co-organized hackathons and workshops. This announcement follows OpenAI's Station F residency and a string of European ecosystem partnerships announced over the past 12 months by the world’s most valuable private AI company.

🌍 Headlines from around the world

• 🍎 Tim Cook will step down as Apple CEO on September 1 with hardware engineering head John Ternus taking the helm of the world's most valuable company (TechCrunch)

• 📈 Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky confirmed the company won't IPO before 2028 and is targeting a $200 billion valuation (Sifted)

• ⚖️ The Musk v. Altman trial begins with $134B at stake over OpenAI's for-profit conversion (NPR)

• 💼 Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts for up to 7% of its US workforce, a first for the tech giant (CNBC)

• 🚀 SpaceX secured an option to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for the ongoing collaboration (TechCrunch)

• 🏦 SumUp is reportedly meeting with investment banks ahead of a long-awaited IPO on the London Stock Exchange (Bloomberg)

• 🪓 Meta to cut 10% of its workforce or 20,000 roles (CNBC)

• 🤖 Google commits up to $40B in cash and compute to Anthropic (Bloomberg)

• 🕵️ UK intelligence revealed that 100 countries now possess commercial phone-hacking spyware, with targeting increasingly expanding to bankers and wealthy businesspeople (TechCrunch)

• 📜 Palantir published a mini-manifesto denouncing DEI, "inclusivity," and what it calls "regressive" cultures inside enterprise tech companies (TechCrunch)

• 🐛 Lovable denied a mass data breach but admitted a BOLA API vulnerability had sat open for 48 days exposing users' project data (The Register)

New Funding 💶

6 companies announced €49M in new funding last week.

Upcoming Events 🗓

• Pitch Roast #1: Pitch your startup to a Kima Ventures investor — April 30

• Physical AI Happy Hour: Paris — May 4

• MCP Connect Paris — May 6

• Offline Forest Walk | Forest of Fontainebleau — May 9

• European Defense Tech Meetup, Paris – May 19

• Contech Connect @ Station F – May 28

• VivaTech 2026 – June 17-20

• INSEAD AI Forum, Paris – June 22-23

• INSEAD LaunchPad Demo Day – June 30

What Else I’m Reading 📚

• Why You Should Never Go Into VC (Jeff Becker) – interesting look at fund math, LP dynamics, and what makes a moat in VC.

• How to double your luck (George Mack)

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