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🇫🇷 French Tech Updates — March 9, 2026. €229.3M in new funding for French companies.

🇫🇷 French Tech Updates — March 9, 2026. €229.3M in new funding for French companies.

What you need to know this week in France: 🧑‍🔬 Bpifrance launches Deeptech accelerator, 🇪🇺 EU allocates €75M for native cloud infra

James Saulsky
March 09, 2026

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.

It feels like a shift has happened in the last few weeks. Claude Code, CoWork, Chat and then OpenClaw are breaking into the popular discourse and more people I speak with are realizing just how powerful these AI tools can be. Anthropic refusing to bend to the American military’s demands and the subsequent #CancelChatGPT movement which sent Claude rocketing to the top of the app store charts no doubt accelerated this adoption.

I count myself as part of the “more people” crowd and have spent a lot of time recently learning what Claude is capable of.

As part of this learning process I’ve watched around two dozen videos about CoWork and found one commonality across them especially amusing. There is a script to these videos that goes something like this:

Claude is a very impressive AI tool.
It can use skills and plugins to automate the work of entire teams.
Multiple agents running at once can research, plan, and code new products for you in minutes.
It can even organize your desktop.

That last one cracks me up every time.

Somehow, the go-to example for showing off Claude’s capabilities is that it can organize your mess of a desktop folder.

What a time to be alive.

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What’s new this week in 🇫🇷

🧑‍🔬 Bpifrance launches Deeptech Seed accelerator

The new 4-month program by the French investor is intended to support deeptech founders prepare for their first fundraise and bridge the gap from research lab to funded startup. 75 companies will participate in 2026 across three cohorts and each company will receive 12 hours of individual coaching, four group workshops, and a Demo Day in front of 100 investors.

🇪🇺 This week in digital sovereignty: an EU alternative to AWS

The EU is allocating €75 million to build a shared European cloud computing network that will run on telecom infrastructure across member states rather than on American hyperscalers like AWS or Azure. The goal, like many of these digital sovereignty programs, is to keep sensitive European data and workloads off US-owned infrastructure. This is a bold expectation for the price tag, especially considering Amazon is spending ≈ $500 million per day on AWS related CapEx this year.

🌍 Headlines from around the world

🛡️ The Pentagon officially designates Anthropic a supply-chain risk, the first American company to ever receive the label (TechCrunch)
🤖 OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 claiming 33% fewer factual errors than its predecessor (TechCrunch)
🏛️ OpenAI explores a contract to deploy its AI on NATO's unclassified networks, days after striking its Pentagon deal (The Information)
🇨🇳 China's 15th Five-Year Plan mentions AI over 50 times targeting a 10 trillion yuan AI industry by 2030 (Reuters)
💴 SoftBank is seeking a record $40 billion loan to expand its OpenAI stake, after the company's $110B raise valued it at $730B (Bloomberg)
⚖️ Stockholm legal AI startup Legora is in talks to triple its valuation from $1.8B to $6B in under a year, making it the fastest European unicorn reprice on record (Sifted)
🚀 Spain's PLD Space raises €180M Series C led by Mitsubishi Electric to scale its Miura 5 orbital rocket (Tech EU)
₿ a16z's crypto arm is targeting $2 billion for its fifth fund, roughly half the size of its 2022 vehicle (Fortune)
💻 U.S. officials are drafting an AI chip export framework that would condition large-scale chip sales to foreign buyers on commitments to invest in American data centers (US News)
🇬🇧 The UK launches a £40 million Frontier AI Research Lab to build independent AI research infrastructure and reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants (Sifted)

New Funding 💶

8 companies announced €229.3M in new funding last week.

MadeForMed | €200K | 🏥 HealthTech

Marseille's MadeForMed raised €200K from an unlikely source: its own users. 400 general practitioners who participated in the crowdsourced round are now shareholders it the company, which builds white-label digital tools for medical offices (scheduling, teleconsultation, messaging).

Albupad | €1.3M | 🧬 Biotech

Strasbourg's Albupad raised €1.3 million in a pre-seed round backed by Yeast, Alsace Business Angels, and Bpifrance. Founded in 2024 out of the University of Strasbourg, the company has built a way to make drugs linger in the body longer and to maximize their impact for patients with chronic diseases and cancers who currently endure frequent, often imprecise dosing.

Amatera | €6M | 🌾 Agritech

Amatera raised €6 million in a round led by Demea Sustainable Investment and German VC Oyster Bay, alongside existing investors Pinc and Exceptional Ventures, to deploy its next-generation plant genetics platform. The company focuses on improving survivability of woody crops like vines, fruit trees, and other ligneous plants—segments which have been badly underserved by agri-biotech but are now on the front lines of climate-driven crop failure.

baCta | €7M | 🧬 Biotech

Paris-based baCta raised €7 million in a seed round led by LocalGlobe and Daphni, with OVNI Capital and angels including the Mistral founders, to turn microorganisms into programmable molecular factories for industrial ingredients. The first target is a high-value antioxidant used in cosmetics, aquaculture, and nutraceuticals. baCta is betting its AI-driven precision fermentation platform can hit commercial scale before the synthetic chemistry incumbents can adapt.

Metavonics | €7.3M | ✈️ Aerospace

Metavonics raised €7.3 million in a Series A backed by Safran Corporate Ventures and Austrian safety-tech firm TTTech to scale its modular avionics platform. Founded in 2021, the company builds standardized, certified electronic components and software tools that let engineers develop, integrate, and upgrade safety-critical flight systems with far less red tape than the current monolithic stack requires.

Heliup | €16M | ⚡ Renewable Energy

Based in Savoie, Heliup raised €16 million in a Series A led by Supernova Invest alongside MAIF Impact, BNP Paribas Développement, and Starquest Capital. The company produces ultralight photovoltaic panels which weigh less than 1/3 as much as conventional solar panels. The lighter panels can then be placed on a wider range of rooftops which gives Heliup a larger target market to pursue for solar electrification.

DeepIP | €21.5M | ⚖️ Legaltech

Paris-based (with a New York outpost), DeepIP raised €21.5 million ($25 million) in a Series B round led by Korelya Capital alongside Serena, Headline, and Balderton Capital. The company embeds AI to help patent lawyers draft, research, and manage IP filings across 25 jurisdictions, like GitHub Copilot for patent law. With 400+ clients including Dexcom and Philips, revenue up 5x in a year, and 40,000+ files processed DeepIP is now targeting further expansion across the US, EU, and Asia.

Pasqal | €170M | 🖲️ Quantum Computing

Palaiseau-based Pasqal raised €170 million plus €170 million in committed pre-listing financing valuing the company at $2 billion and making it France's first quantum unicorn. Pasqal is now eyeing a Nasdaq listing via SPAC later this year, with a Euronext Paris secondary potentially in 2027. Investors include Temasek, Saudi Aramco, LG Electronics, Quanta Computer, and CMA CGM.