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.

ChatGPT thinks French entrepreneurs are sexy 🥰

Inequalities.ai has created a very fun database that visualizes ChatGPT’s opinions on different counties and cities. The queries cover everything from which country is better looking to where the best startup ecosystems and entrepreneurs come from.

According to the models over at OpenAI, France has plenty of sexy, intelligent entrepreneurs who may not be the most friendly or hardworking, but do benefit from overall good vibes in the country and a pleasant work life balance.

The website is basically a stereotype visualizer—and that’s the point, to reveal ChatGPT’s biases. Of course, each of those biases originated in the training data, and that training data came from human beings.

I recommend checking it out for yourself to see whether you agree with the rankings.

And with that, let’s jump into this week’s update.

What’s new this week in 🇫🇷

🤖 Station F is launching a new program: F/ai

I’ve been hearing rumblings about this program for the last few weeks from a few tight lipped founders, and now the news is finally public! Station F, the world’s largest startup campus, launched a new AI-focused program last month with an initial batch of 20 startups.

The program aims to aid the selected 15 French and 5 international companies reach the €1 million revenue mark within 6 months and offers go-to-market support to

The program is supported by a group of heavy hitters that include Microsoft, Meta, Mistral, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and AMD along with investors General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, 20VC, and others.

🚢 Eurazeo closed €175 million for its maritime decarbonisation fund

It’s the first close of what is hoped to eventually be a €400 million fund. The capital will go towards supporting 20-30 maritime decarbonization projects in offshore renewable energy, port infrastructure, and ship construction.

The fund, the second of its kind for Eurazeo, has already made its first two investments in Dutch shipowner Longship Group.

💰 Elaia’s Digital Ventures V completed its first €120 million close

The new fund is planned to reach €200 million in total commitments and will back B2B-focused companies in Europe across pre-seed to Series B rounds with checks up to €15 million. LPs include Bpifrance, J.P. Morgan, and BNP Paribas.

Elaia, which has previously invested in companies like Mirakl, Alice & Bob, dottext, Sim&Cure, and vibe.co, already made its first investment from the new fund last November as part of mimic robotics’ €13.8 million seed round.

🇸🇪 Mistral is investing €1.2 billion into Swedish data centers

The French AI darling is is partnering with Sweden’s EcoDataCenter for a data center buildout planned to open in 2027. This large sum (equivalent to 41% of all capital Mistral has raised) is part of an ambition to build “a fully European AI technology stack — from infrastructure and models to software — where all data is processed and stored locally in Europe.”

The nordics have seen a surge of AI investment recently, including from rival OpenAI, since their colder climates are friendlier for running hot racks of GPUs. More broadly, “a fully European AI technology stack” sounds a lot like digital sovereignty—the catch phrase of 2026.

Mistral began leaning into infrastructure last year with the launch of Mistral Compute, their European-hosted AI cloud. The three-year-old company has big plans to this year, aiming to grow revenue from €400 million in 2025 to €1 billion in 2026. If the size of the investment is any indication, Mistral sees infrastructure as a key factor for reaching that milestone.

🙋‍♂️ Quiz: Between 2024-2025, how much revenue did the average US startup earn at the time of their Series A fundraise?

(answer at the bottom of the newsletter)

• A.) $1 million

• B.) $2.5 million

• C.) $9 million

• D.) $15.7 million

🌍 Headlines from around the world

• 🍎 Apple’s 100 year bonds are turning heads, and raising questions (yahoo!finance)

• 💰💰💰 Anthropic raised a $30 billion Series G round at a $380 billion valuation (Anthropic)

• ❌ xAI loses senior talent and co-founders (TechCrunch)

• 📱 Instagram is on trial for its “addictive” product (NYT)

• ▶️ YouTube is also under fire in ongoing “addictive” product trial (NYT)

• 🤖 Amazon may launch a marketplace where media sites can sell their content to AI companies (TechCrunch)

• ⚡️ Anthropic to cover costs of electricity price increases from its data centers (NBC)

• 📣 OpenAI begins testing ads in ChatGPT for U.S. users (OpenAI)

• 🤑 Legaltech Harvey, which is expanding to Paris, is in talks to raise $200M at an $11B valuation (Forbes)

• 🇷🇺 Russia seeks to block WhatsApp (Semafor)

New Funding 💶

10 companies announced €220.6M in new funding last week including €200K by Sailiz (🏅 Sports)

Upcoming Events 🗓

• Paris Hardware Meetup | The New Defense Stack – February 17

• OpenAI talk on HEC campus – February 17

• 🆕 Pitch Night à Station F – February 18

• Prototyper un site ou une app avec l’IA : atelier v0 I Lion x Paatch – February 18

• 🆕 AI Tech & Startup Night, Paris – February 18

• 🆕 🎥 (Online) ElevenLabs, from Zero to $330M ARR in 3 years : 7 keys to success – February 18

• Maddy Invest Awards – February 19

• 🆕 Climate Coffee @Paris – February 19

• 🆕 AI Developer Meetup on Agents & Evaluation – February 19

• 🆕 Cafe Cursor Paris – February 25

• 🆕 Startups and Operators Pitch night Paris – February 25

• 🆕 Paris Design Club Afterwork #2 – February 26

• 🆕 VivaTech 2026 – June 17-20

Interesting Jobs 👩‍💻

• ⚙️ Senior Operations Associate @ Roundtable

• 💼 Head of Sales @ Vizzia

• 🤝 BDR Team Manager @ WeeFin

• 🤖 Associate AI Deployment Strategist @ Mistral

• 🎓 Performance Marketing Intern @ Electra

• 🎓 Product Marketing Intern @ Qonto

• 👨‍💻 Product Manager, Mistral Vibe @ Mistral

• 🎓 Founder Associate Program @ Fairmat

• 📈 Demand Generation Manager, EMEA @ Filigran

What Else I’m Reading 📚

• Becoming an artist to outrun the machines (Dan Hockenmaier)

• The story of ai.com and its failed Super Bowl campaign (Michal Podlewski)

• How The New York Times uses a custom AI tool to track the “manosphere” (NiemanLab)

• 200 lines of markdown just triggered a $285 billion sell-off (Nate’s Notebook)

Newsletter Recommendations 🫶

Quiz Answer: B.) $2.5 million

According to data SBV and analysis by Carta, $2.5 million was the average revenue at the time of a Series A fundraise—although the range is pretty big from $30K to $11.4 million.