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.

VivaTech 2025 is in the record books 📕 

Last week Paris was buzzing with events surrounding the 9th edition of Europe’s largest tech conference—VivaTech. While I couldn’t be everywhere, I was able to attend a few exclusive talks with some of France’s most ambitious founders. In case you missed it, you can checkout this recap of one of these talks, featuring Dust founder Gabriel Hubert and Shakers founder Jaime Castillo.

Like any event where President Macron is present, the conference played host to a mix of big announcements, posturing, and selfie-opportunities.

While there was plenty of fluff to go around, the hard news side of the week focused around AI, partnerships, and European tech sovereignty (more on that below). For a comprehensive recap of the VIvaTech’s top news check out this excellent coverage from The French Tech Journal.

With that, let’s jump into this week’s update!

📝 Quiz: Which industry represents the highest # of startups in La French Tech’s Next 40 list?

(answer at the bottom of the newsletter)

• A.) 🤖 AI & Data

• B.) 🧬 Biotech

• C.) 💳 Fintech

• D.) ⚡️ Energy Tech

What’s new this week in 🇫🇷

• 🌍 Mistral partners with NVIDIA to build a sovereign AI cloud in France: Arthur Mensch, CEO of the Paris-based AI unicorn, and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang discussed the partnership during VivaTech with Mensch saying “the mission of Mistral has always been to bring frontier AI to everyone. We realized our customers were in need of a solution that would be fully European where not only the software but also everything sitting on the ground, the actual assets, would be European.” Last week was a big one for Mistral, which is reportedly preparing for a massive $1 billion fundraise. In addition to the NVIDIA partnership, the company also launched Mistral Code.

• 🤗 Hugging Face debuts new models for robotics and spreadsheet creation: The French-born AI company introduced SmolVLA, a lightweight robotics model capable of running on a laptop computer, and Sheets—a generative model that can build entire spreadsheets from natural language prompts.

• 🌪️ H Company gets a new CEO: it’s been a turbulent year at Paris-based AI startup which saw 3/5 co-founders leave H Company just months after they raised a mega €220 million round. Last week the change train continued to roll as current former-CEO Charles Kantor was replaced by a former executive from Palantir. The news came days after H Company announced the launch of a suite of autonomous AI agents.

• 🇪🇺 The EU launches its own internet address system to lower dependence on the US: DNS4EU (catchy name) is a new internet service designed to help people access websites safely and privately—without relying on U.S. companies like Google or Cloudflare. The service gives users more control over their browsing experience with filters to block harmful sites, adult content, and ads while keeping user data protected under EU privacy laws.

🌍 Headlines from around the world

• ⚔️ Europe moves to challenge dollar with Eurobonds (Bloomberg)

• 🥇 Anne Wojcicki wins bidding for embattled 23andMe (WSJ)

• 🪙 Walmart and Amazon are exploring issuing their own stablecoins (WSJ)

• 🤑 Meta confirmed its $14.3 billion investment in seven-year-old San Francisco startup Scale AI—prompting some of Scale AI’s largest clients to leave the platform (CNBC)

• 👩‍⚖️ Disney and Universal sue Midjourney for copyright infringement (NYT)

• 🤝 DoorDash is acquiring AdTech startup Symbiosys for $175 million (AdWeek)

• 🖲️ India has opened a new Quantum Technology Research Centre for defense applications (Quantum Insider)

• 💽 Thailand to invest $1 billion for a new 100-megawatt data center (Reuters)

• 🏪 Chime’s IPO prices at less than ½ its peak private valuation (CNBC)

New Funding 💶

9 companies announced €150.6M in new funding last week.

Upcoming Events 🗓

• Occupy the Feed (hosted by Hexa) – June 17

• PMM Talks in Paris – June 17

• Demo Day Ignaite – June 17

• Job Fair, alternance & premier emploi à la Climate House – June 19

• Afterwork Meta x Simio x Roads – June 24

• CTO Breakfast with YouTube France Engineering Director – June 26

• Paris AI Club: July – July 2

• French Tech Connect 2025 – July 3

• RAISE Summit – July 8

• Hacking Paris – July 11-13

Interesting Jobs 👩‍💻

• 📲 Influencer & Ambassador Program Manager @ Qonto (referral link)

• 🧑‍💻 Product Marketing Manager @ Weefin

• 👩‍💼 Senior Product Manager @ Tomorro

• ✋ Right Hand to CEO USA Internship @ Sunday

• 💼 Account Executive, Commercial France & Southern Europe @ Mistral

• 📈 Digital Marketing Apprentice @ Sekoia

• ⚙️ Marketing Operations Specialist @ Spendesk

• 🤝 Benelux Business Development Lead @ Roundtable

• 🫡 Chief Product Officer @ Mirakl

What Else I’m Reading 📚

• ChatGPT users reportedly spiral into psychosis after intense, unsupervised conversations with the AI chatbot (New York Times)

• OpenAI’s models reportedly show a bias towards self-preservation and refuse to be shut down, even when doing so would be safer for their human users (TechCrunch)

Newsletter Recommendations 🫶

Quiz Answer: D.) ⚡️ Energy Tech

With 6 companies making up 15% of the Next 40 list, energy tech narrowly edged out Fintech and HR tech to top the list by industry.