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  • 🇫🇷 French Tech Updates — June 2, 2026. €79.88M in new funding for French companies

🇫🇷 French Tech Updates — June 2, 2026. €79.88M in new funding for French companies

What you need to know this week in France: 🦁 Welcome to the Jungle CEO steps down after AI pivot, 🤖 Mistral reveals full-stack ambitions, 💶 €93 billion in investment pledges.

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 in 🇫🇷

Choose France 2026: 71 investment pledges total €93 billion

The ninth Choose France summit, Macron’s last, attracted 200+ international business leaders and produced a wave of investment pledges into France and French tech. Among them were a €75 billion commitment from the SoftBank (the largest in European history) to build out AI data centers. The first three are planned for development over the next five years in the Hauts-de-France region (Dunkirk, Bosquel, Bouchain) with Schneider Electric coming on as an industrial partner in the buildouts.

Revolut also announced an additional €100 million investment in France—which comes at the same time the 11th most valuable private company in the world is working to open their Paris office next year.

Mistral AI unveils full-stack ambitions at AI Now Summit

At its AI Now Summit in Paris on May 28, Mistral revealed the latest scope of their ambitions, moving further away from frontier lab and closer to a full-stack AI platform provider. To accomplish this transformation, Mistral is rolling out a host of initiatives, some new and some pre-existing including:

  • Vibe—a rebrand of Le Chat into a unified agent platform with Work Mode and VS Code integration

  • An industrial AI stack targeting aerospace and automotive industries with Airbus, BMW Group, and ASML as named customers.

  • €4 billion committed to data center infrastructure in France and Sweden as part of Mistral Compute with a first 10 MW inference centre near Les Ulis planned to open in Q3 of this year. CEO Arthur Mensch also told CNBC that Mistral is exploring custom chip design, which would complete the sovereign full-stack trifecta from hardware to data centers to models.

Jérémy Clédat steps down as CEO of Welcome to the Jungle

Jérémy Clédat, co-founder of Welcome to the Jungle, announced he'll leave the CEO role on July 1 after 11 years building the company from a recruitment media brand to an AI enabled hiring platform pulling in ~€40 million ARR between France and the UK. Clédat will move to a board position, but interestingly a successor has not yet been named and a search is reportedly underway. The departure comes three months after the company pivoted in favor of becoming a “fully AI-native recruitment platform” and abandoned its long-standing job board model. Along with that recent change, the new CEO will inherit an ambitious target of growing from 4,500 to 15,000 clients by 2029.

Livestorm makes its first acquisition at age 10

Webinar platform Livestorm acquired Qlip AI, a Paris-based AI video processing startup, in its first-ever acquisition. Qlip's technology will power "Livestorm AI Studio," a tool that automatically turns webinar replays into short clips, summaries, and publish-ready content, with a launch targeted for this summer. Qlip was founded in 2020 after going through the Entrepreneurs First accelerator and previously raised a €1.57 million Seed round. Co-founder Pamela Carvallo will join Livestorm as Director of AI while it appears that Qlip’s second founder, Svend Court-Payen, plans to pursue a new startup.

Quandela puts industrialization governance in place

One of France's leading quantum computing companies reshuffled its executive org chart, naming Michel Paulin (ex-OVHcloud) as chairman, Cyril Dujardin (ex-Atos, Eutelsat) as COO, and Michel Zecri as VP Industrialization. Paulin previously grew OVHcloud into one of Europe's largest cloud infrastructure businesses during his six-year tenure and even commissioned a Quandela machine while he was there. Dujardin ran complex transformations at Atos and Eutelsat. Quandela has spent the last 9 years building photonic quantum computers and these moves indicate it's now building the organization to commercialize them at scale.

🙋‍♂️ Quiz: Globally defense tech deals reached a funding record in Q1, 2026. How much was raised in total?

(answer at the bottom of the newsletter)

  • A.) $8.1 billion

  • B.) $19.8 billion

  • C.) $57 billion

  • D.) $191 billion

🌍 Headlines around the world

  • 💰 Cognition raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation as Devin's revenue run rate jumped from $37M to $492M in a single year (TechCrunch)

  • 🧑‍💻 Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic's pre-training team, leaving Eureka Labs to return to frontier research (TechCrunch)

  • ✂️ ClickUp cut 22% of its workforce, deployed 3,000 internal AI agents, and offered $1M salaries to the 1,010 employees who stayed (TechCrunch)

  • ✝️ Pope Leo XIV published a 42,000-word AI encyclical warning that opaque algorithms controlled by a handful of companies risk "new forms of dehumanization" (Time)

  • 🎥 YouTube began automatically labelling AI-generated videos even when creators don't disclose them (TechCrunch)

  • 📱 Meta launched paid subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp (TechCrunch)

  • 🏢 Dropbox founder Drew Houston stepped down as CEO after 18 years, naming Ashraf Alkarmi as his successor to pursue AI ventures (Yahoo Finance)

  • ⚡ Nvidia's Jensen Huang announced the company will spend up to $150 billion per year in Taiwan, calling it the "epicentre" of the AI revolution (CNBC)

  • 📊 AI claimed more than 50% of Europe's total startup funding in Q1 2026—the first time this has happened in a single quarter (Crunchbase News)

New Funding 💶

13 companies announced €79.88M in new funding last week.

Orakle Weather | €480k | 📜 Insurtech

Nice-based Orakle Weather raised €480,000 in a Seed round with Campus Fund, Sharpstone Capital, Super Capital, and BeAngels. Founded by Stella Jovet and Rym Ben Hassine, the company embeds parametric rain insurance into outdoor experience and holiday booking flows—payouts trigger automatically within 48 hours when weather conditions qualify, no claims process required. After spending 2024 securing first customers, Orakle sold more than 10,000 policies in 2025.

K-Ren | €1.2M | 🏭 Materials Manufacturing

Based in Mauguio, K-Ren raised €1.2 million in a Seed round led by Sud Mer Invest with business angels including BlaBlaCar founder Frédéric Mazzella. The company makes biocide-free antifouling covers that keep boat hulls clean without the toxic chemicals that standard antifouling paint leaches into the sea. Notably, €120,000 of the round came directly from K-Ren users, including sailors Michel Desjoyeaux, Adrien Hardy, and Quentin Vlamynck.

Leedflow | €1.5M | 🏠 Proptech

Nice-based Leedflow raised €1.5 million in a Seed round from real estate sector business angels, including Édouard Le Goff (ex-founder acquired by Septeo) and Vincent de Saint Sernin (ex-CEO of Orisha Real Estate). The tool records real estate agent calls, auto-fills CRM contact sheets, and schedules follow-up reminders—solving the persistent problem of incomplete CRM databases caused by agents not having time to document interactions. The company plans to expand beyond real estate into other industries that rely on mobile sales teams.

MySunBed | €1.6M | ✈️ Travel

Nice-based MySunBed raised €1.6 million from business angels. Founded by Sébastien Tomi and Brice Sorgia, the company runs a marketplace for booking private beach sunbeds and provides management software for beach operators—currently serving about 100 beaches in France, with international expansion into Italy, Dubai, Morocco, Spain, and Mexico since October 2025. The company estimates the private beach market at €25 billion annually and is targeting €1.3 million in revenue this year.

Otomato | €1.7M | ₿ Cryptocurrency & Blockchain

Paris-based Otomato raised €1.7 million in a strategic investment round from UK venture builder Improbable. The product monitors a user's on-chain positions across protocols like AAVE, Uniswap, Morpho, and Euler, and surfaces only the alerts that actually matter — liquidation risk, cost spikes, yield opportunities — rather than flooding users with noise. Founded by Clement Hecquet and Dylan Breugne, the company has grown to 2,000+ users organically, with 1,500 actively receiving alerts.

Certo | €3.1M | ⚖️ Legaltech

Certo raised €3.1 million in a Seed round led by Daphni with Entrepreneurs First, Motier Ventures (the Galeries Lafayette family office), and Transpose Platform, plus a $500,000 loan bringing total financing to $4 million. Founded in Paris in 2025, the company's AI agents check whether a beauty or consumer goods product meets regulatory requirements across 40+ markets including the EU, US, China, South Korea, Japan, Latin America. Founders Bastien Deliège-Coste and Jean Duquenne are using the capital to build out the five modules of the platform and expand commercially in Europe and the US.

ThIA Santé Mentale | €5M | 🩺 Medtech

Montpellier-based ThIA Santé Mentale raised €5 million in a growth round from IRDI Capital Investissement, Sofilaro Innovation, Generali, AG2R La Mondiale, Tudigo, and Practitioner Partners. Founded by Dr. Yann Quintilla and Frédérique Mozziconacci, the company's AviPsy model pairs psychologists and psychiatrists in a coordinated care protocol that has cut average time-to-treatment from the national average of 67 days to 9 days across more than 30,000 patients with reported outcomes including a 38% reduction in anxiolytic medication use and a 58% reduction in work stoppages. One third of the round funds AI integration into the clinical platform while the rest funds clinical trials for a depressive relapse monitoring device targeting Social Security reimbursement by 2028.

VorteX-io | €8.5M | 🌡️ Climate Tech

Toulouse-based VorteX-io raised €8.5 million in a Series A round led by Seventure Partners' Blue Forward Fund with Banque des Territoires and Daphni. Founded by Guillaume Valladeau and Jean-Christophe Poisson, the company deploys autonomous river monitoring stations with a remote control center and analytics platform that turns hydrological data into decision tools for governments and public agencies. Nearly 1,000 stations are now deployed across four continents, collecting more than 4 million real-time data points in 2025.

Opal | €8.6M | 🎧 Consumer Tech

Paris and New York-based Opal raised €8.6 million ($10 million) in a Seed round with Adjacent, Speedinvest, Night Capital, Tony Fadell, Severin Hacker, Elad Gil, and Mathilde Collin. The app blocks digital distractions and tracks focus, sleep, and rest with a new AI layer called Autofocus that proactively intervenes before users lose focus rather than waiting to be manually activated. More than 10 million people have installed it, with one million daily active users and over 300 million hours of attention reclaimed to date.

Olyzon | €8.6M | 📢 Marketing

Paris-based Olyzon raised €8.6 million ($10 million) in a Series A round led by S4S Ventures, the firm co-founded by Sir Martin Sorrell, with Eurazeo. The company automates media planning, campaign activation, and measurement for Connected TV advertising to handle the coordination across DSPs, SSPs, and fragmented CTV inventory that agencies currently do manually. Publicis, WPP, OMD, Mastercard, Audi, and McDonald's are already clients. The round funds US expansion and a London office.

Otrera | €9.5M | ☢️ Nuclear Energy

Based in Aix-en-Provence, Otrera raised €9.5 million in a strategic investment round with EDF, Groupe ADF, Onet Technologies, REEL, Ingerop, Fortil, Exergon, and Normandie Participations. The CEA spin-off is developing a fourth-generation sodium-cooled fast-neutron small modular reactor, a design France attempted twice before (Superphénix, then Astrid) without completing. The funding secures the pre-project phase for a component manufacturing factory near Cherbourg, targeted for 2028.

MokN | €12.9M | 🛡️ Cybersecurity

Paris-based MokN raised €12.9 million ($15 million) in a Series A round led by GV, marking GV's first-ever investment in a French startup. Datadog, Moonfire, and Ovni Capital also participated in the round. Founded in 2023 by Gautier Bugeon and Antoine Coudoux, MokN builds "phish-back" technology: it deploys ultra-realistic fake VPN portals and web mail interfaces that mimic a company's actual environment, tricking attackers into handing back stolen credentials before those credentials can be used. The company protects over one million users for 35 clients, including several CAC40 groups, and will use the round for new product development and expansion into the US and UK.

Lucis | €17.2M | 🏥 HealthTech

Paris-based Lucis raised €17.2 million ($20 million) in a Series A round led by Singular with General Catalyst and Y Combinator. The company runs a preventive health platform that analyses blood biomarkers and uses AI to deliver personalised health recommendations. Since launching in 2025, Lucis has reached 10,000+ users across France, the UK, Ireland, and Portugal and has run more than one million biomarker tests. The round follows hot on the heels of a €7.2 million Seed in December 2025 as Lucis now targets further expansion into additional European markets.

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Quiz Answer: B.) $19.8 billion

That total was reached across 262 tracked deals according to PitchBook—with autonomous combat and defense solutions showing up as the primary themes.