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 🇫🇷

👷‍♂️ Mistral levers up with $830M to finance their data center buildout

Mistral has secured $830 million in the largest ever European AI debt raise. The financing came from a seven-bank consortium led by Bpifrance with BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, and others supporting. The capital will fund a data center in Île-de-France housing 13,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs targeted to go live by end of June 2026. Until now, Mistral ran on Azure, Google Cloud, and CoreWeave, which are dependencies increasingly viewed as a sovereignty risk by its government and military clients.

✌️ ManoMano's founders exit the company

Christian Raisson and Philippe de Chanville, co-founders of ManoMano, announced their departure from operational roles this week, ending a decade at the helm of a scale-up they built into one of France's most closely watched companies. Their exit follows years of mounting difficulties which included repeated rounds of layoffs, a post-e-commerce-boom growth deceleration, and a market that has been brutal for cash-hungry marketplaces. ManoMano raised over €600 million and was once valued at over €2 billion but, according to research from Mighty Nine, ManoMano has since lost their unicorn valuation status. Whether the company can pull of a recovery could be a bellwether for the 2020-2021 generation of French unicorns.

🎌 French Tech accompanies Macron to Japan and South Korea 

Emmanuel Macron's Asian tour included a delegation of French startup CEOs as part of a tech diplomacy blitz coordinated from the Élysée. The most concrete outcomes of the trip were meetings between Mistral and Samsung and with South Korea's National AI Strategy Committee to discuss Franco-Korean AI cooperation. The French government is increasingly using presidential trade missions to open doors for its tech ecosystem in markets where war relationships are a prerequisite to doing business.

🏥 Ludocare is close to becoming France's first reimbursable digital therapy

On April 2 France's health authority issued a favorable opinion on allowing patients to get reimbursed for using Joe—the digital therapy developed by Lyon-based startup Ludocare for pediatric asthma. Joe guides children aged 7 to 11 through their daily asthma treatment via an interactive robot paired with a mobile application. The decision remains preliminary and is pending a Ministry of Health ruling for reimbursement to take effect. If fully approved, it will mark a historic first in France that could open a path for other French medtech companies.

🌱 French greentech struggle to bring in the green

The 5th edition of Bpifrance's Observatoire des greentechs françaises counted an impressive 2,900 greentech startups in the French ecosystem but saw fundraising in decline as VC capital concentrates heavily on AI. France’s greentech businesses are feeling the squeeze from all sides following a 41% decline in VC investment and less capital of all kinds for capex-intensive buildouts. Greentech companies that need to build battery recycling plants or large energy infrastructure will need to find other sources of funding as more investor cash is funneled towards costly AI projects.

🙋‍♂️ Quiz: How much funding did French startups announce in Q1 2026?

(answer at the bottom of the newsletter)

• A.) €1.1 billion

• B.) €2.3 billion

• C.) €2.9 billion

• D.) €3.2 billion

🌍 Headlines from around the world

• 🤖 Microsoft's in-house MAI team released three foundational models covering transcription, voice generation, and image generation (TechCrunch)

• 💪 Whoop raised $575M in a Series G at a $10 billion valuation with LeBron James and Cristiano Ronaldo among the backers (TechCrunch)

• 🇪🇺 EQT and Atomico are the final two in the running to manage the EU's €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund for deeptech (Sifted)

• 🌕 Artemis II lifted off with four astronauts aboard for NASA's first crewed deep-space mission in over 50 years (NASA)

• 🎬 Runway launched a $10M venture fund and a Builders program offering free API credits to early-stage startups building on its video AI models (TechCrunch)

• 🎙️ OpenAI acquired Silicon Valley talk show TBPN for an estimated “low hundreds of millions of dollars” in its first media acquisition (TechCrunch)

• 🎵 ElevenLabs released a free iOS app for music creation called ElevenMusic (TechCrunch)

• 💊 The FDA approved Eli Lilly's oral GLP-1 pill Foundayo with analysts forecasting $21 billion in global sales by 2030 (Bloomberg)

• 🌱 Matt Clifford announced he is stepping back from Entrepreneurs First, the talent-first accelerator he co-founded in 2011 (Sifted)

• ⚛️ Finnish quantum computing startup IQM raised €50M in one of Europe's largest ever quantum funding rounds (Sifted)

New Funding 💶

8 companies announced €107.2M in new funding last week.

Upcoming Events 🗓

• 🆕 Claude Code for Developers – April 7

• Claude Builders Night – April 7

• Build Your First AI Agent | Dust x Eria – April 8

• 🆕 From Models to Agents: AI in Real Production Systems – April 8

• 🆕 3rd Paris Hardware Meetup | Chips, Cloud & Compute – April 8

• 🆕 Open House Explordays – Beyond the Zone – April 9

• GPU MODE IRL Hackathon (PyTorch Conference Europe side event) – April 9

• 🆕 Hack the Block 2026 — Paris Blockchain Week XRPL Hackathon – April 11–12

• 🆕 Agents Anonymous + OpenClaw Meet-up – April 14

• 🆕 Crypto Legislative Hackathon – April 14

• 🆕 Fintech à Paris with Worldpay & BVNK – April 15

• 🆕 Blurred Lines: The Evolution of Product & Design with AI – April 15

• 🆕 AI Marketing Night #6 – April 16

• AI Circle Paris: Kill the PR? How AI is Rewriting the SDLC – April 22

• 🆕 FIA x Microsoft x Avalon (5ᵉ Afterwork FIA) – April 23

• Paris Fintech Hackathon: Solve with AI – April 25

• VivaTech 2026 – June 17-20

Interesting Jobs 👩‍💻

• 📣 Founding Marketing Lead @ Vocca

• ✍️ Content / Copywriter — English (CDD) @ Greenly

• 📱 Product Marketing Manager Intern @ Qonto

• 🤝 Senior Business Development @ Roundtable

• ⚙️ Strategic Operations Associate @ lemlist

• 📣 Marketing Lead @ H Company

• 🚀 Founder's Associate @ Animaj

• 🔩 Founders Associate Program @ Fairmat

• 🗂️ Head of CRM @ Qonto

• 💰 Chief Revenue Officer @ Greenly

What Else I’m Reading 📚

• Dispatch from the permanent underclass (Jack Raines)

• How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company (NYT)

Newsletter Recommendations 🫶

Quiz Answer: C.) 2.9 billion

That’s a solid showing that represents a whopping 68% increase compared to Q1 last year. For more insights from Q1, 2026 get the full report here.