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  • 🇫🇷 French Tech Updates — May 11, 2026. €166.1M in new funding for French companies.

🇫🇷 French Tech Updates — May 11, 2026. €166.1M in new funding for French companies.

What you need to know this week in France: 📣 Mistral’s wake up call for the EU, 🇬🇧 Doctolib’s UK expansion, 📉 France’s disappearing Series A rounds.

Author

James Saulsky
May 10, 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.

What’s new this week in 🇫🇷

📣 European Tech Creators’ issue a wake up call to Brussels

“Europe is losing global competitiveness each and every day. We are facing a crisis largely of our own making – and therefore one we are able to overcome.” Those are the opening sentences of a new OpEd published by Mistral, ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Nokia, SAP, and Siemens—not exactly the grouping of supporters you’d expect to see alongside to two of Europe’s leading AI players.

The two page document manages to simultaneously be very specific while remaining surprisingly vague in its demands. In general, the companies voice their support for the reforms pushed by EU Inc. and also call for a friendlier M&A environment, increased government support for dual-use innovation spanning military and civilian applications, and a dedicated forum where the EU’s business and political leaders can align on shared objectives. The OpEd’s call to “fiercely support and scale homegrown European innovation” sound a lot like a battle cry for digital sovereignty—which has cemented itself as a key theme for 2026 and beyond.

🇬🇧 Doctolib expands to the UK with £100 million commitment

Doctolib, ubiquitous in France as the primary means of booking appointments with doctors and specialists, has taken a significant step by expanding into the United Kingdom with the acquisition of Medicus—a London-based startup providing software services to NHS doctors. In addition to the acquisition, Doctolib announced plans to hire 150 employees, alongside Medicus’ existing 25 employees, and invest £100 million into the market in the coming years.

📉 French startup second-round financing rate collapsed to 13.6%, the worst in Europe

A Breakline Partners report published by Maddyness last week put hard numbers to a feeling many French founders have had: raised a second round in 2026 is hard as hell. The rate of French startups that raised a seed round in 2023 and went on to successfully close a second round has fallen to just 13.6%. That’s a huge decrease from just 6 years ago in 2020 when 46% of companies that had raised a seed round were able to raise a second round within three years. The new number also sits below the European average of 20%, which may be the downside to some of France’s startup success. Capital in France is concentrating in AI, health and biotech, and energy, which leaves most Series A candidates in other sectors grasping at an increasingly dry market.

🙋‍♂️ Quiz: Speaking of seed funding, which industry has the highest post-money Seed round valuations this year?

(answer at the bottom of the newsletter)

  • A.) AI Applications

  • B.) Semiconductors

  • C.) Cybersecurity

  • D.) AI Infrastructure

🌍 Headlines from around the world

🤝 Anthropic launches $1.5B joint venture with Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman in a direct play against McKinsey and Accenture (CNBC)

💼 OpenAI shut down "DeployCo", its $10B enterprise AI joint venture with TPG, SoftBank, and Brookfield which aimed to embed OpenAI engineers inside PE-owned portfolio companies à la Palantir (Bloomberg)

🇩🇪 15 months after raising their €9M seed round, German AI lab Prior Labs is acquired for €1B by SAP (TechCrunch)

🤖 Bret Taylor's enterprise AI agent company Sierra raised $950M at a $15.8B valuation, now valued higher than most European tech unicorns (TechCrunch)

💰 Anthropic is in talks to raise $50B at a $900B valuation (higher than OpenAI) after reporting $30B in annualized revenue that grew 80x in a single quarter (CNBC)

⚡ Anthropic signed a compute deal with SpaceX's Colossus 1 facility (220,000 Nvidia GPUs, 300MW), immediately doubling Claude Code rate limits and announced plans for orbital AI compute capacity (Bloomberg)

💻 Blitzy raises $200M at $1.4B to autonomously complete multi-month enterprise software projects using thousands of parallel AI coding agents — now in production across dozens of Global 2000 companies (BusinessWire)

⚛️ Quantum Motion raises $160M Series C in the UK's largest quantum VC deal ever (SiliconANGLE)

🛰️ Astranis raises $450M at a $2.8B valuation to scale micro-GEO satellite production for telecom operators and the Pentagon, as the US military prepares a major satcom spending surge (SpaceNews)

📊 AI drove Europe's second straight quarter of funding growth in Q1 2026 (up nearly 30% YoY) but deal volume dropped 20% as capital concentrated in fewer, larger rounds (Crunchbase)

🖥️ OpenAI's chip partner Cerebras is on track for a highly anticipated IPO this year (TechCrunch)

🇩🇪 Germany’s DeepL plans to lay off 250 employees as part of a restructuring plan

New Funding 💶

11 companies announced €166.1M in new funding last week including €500K by La Brasserie Parallèle ( 🍽️ Food & Beverage), a Bordeaux-based startup creating non-alcoholic beer.

Objow | €2M | ↔️ B2B Software

Objow raised €2 million from Edenred Capital Partners, Crédit Agricole Création, HUB612, Caisse d'Epargne, Holnest, and Aonia Ventures, plus four individual angels. The startup is built on the thesis that moving 1,000 average performers up one notch beats doubling the output of the top 50. Objow’s platform to support this thesis runs gamified incentive programs for large enterprise sales teams and partner networks that includes challenges, leaderboards, and animated goal-tracking. The raise brings with it the arrival of a new Managing Director, Dimitri Dugne, alongside the new capital.

Orioma | €2.5M | 🏠 Proptech

Grenoble-based Orioma raised €2.5 million in a Seed round to scale production of its LOBX sensor. LOBX replaces multiple separate building systems to manage occupancy counting, temperature, lighting, and security with a single IoT device, allowing facility managers cut energy use without replacing existing infrastructure. The product is already in pilots in Japan and South Korea.

Nelson | €3M | 🛣️ Transportation

Paris-based Nelson raised €3 million in a Seed round led by Asterion Ventures, with La Poste Ventures and EIT Urban Mobility. The startup sells SaaS fleet management software that helps large companies plan and track the transition of their vehicle fleets from combustion to electric with 50,000 vehicles on platform and clients including Orange and Dalkia.

OneFlash | €3.5M | 🎧 Consumer Tech

OneFlash raised €3.5 million in a second funding round from Anthony Bourbon's Blast Club, joining existing investor Xavier Niel. The Paris-based company operates a shared portable phone charging network that allows users to scan, borrow a battery, and return it to any station across 11 countries and 2,000 locations. With the new funding, OneFlash is targeting to more than double the number of available charging stations by 2028.

Davis | €4.6M | 🏠 Proptech

Based in Paris, Davis raised €4.6 million in a Pre-Seed round led by Heartcore Capital and Balderton Capital, with Entrepreneurs First, Yellow, and Evantic, plus angels from the founding teams of SpaceMaker, Hugging Face, Black Forest Labs, Supabase, Cleo, and Spore.bio. The startup targets the most broken phase of real estate development — early-stage feasibility, regulatory checks, and preliminary architectural design — which today takes months and stalls entire pipelines before ground is broken. Alongside the raise, Davis launched Gaudi-1, its first model for generating constraint-compliant architectural designs, cutting that phase from months to hours.

Signadori Bio | €11.1M | 🧬 Biotech

Spun out of Gustave Roussy, Europe's largest cancer centre, Signadori Bio raised €11.1 million in a Seed extension round from Taiho Ventures, Sofinnova Partners and Invivo Partners. The company is engineering monocytes — a class of immune cell — to attack solid tumours in vivo, using an off-the-shelf platform that sidesteps the patient-specific manufacturing bottleneck that has slowed most cell therapy approaches.

OpsMill | €11.9M | ↔️ B2B Software

Based in Paris, OpsMill raised €11.9 million in a Series A led by IRIS, with BGV, Partech, and Serena participating. The company makes Infrahub—an open-source infrastructure data management platform that turns messy enterprise IT data into structured, AI-ready records. The problem it solves is simple to describe and expensive to ignore since most enterprises can't automate or run AI on their infrastructure as long as their underlying data is scattered across spreadsheets, wikis, and aging CMDBs. Founded by Damien Garros and Raphael Maunier (formerly of Roblox), OpsMill's open-source community already includes TikTok and major infrastructure operators, with enterprise customers in insurance, retail, manufacturing, and FinTech across Europe and North America.

Lithosquare | €22M | 🔬 Deeptech

Lithosquare raised €22 million in a Seed round led by World Fund and Kindred Capital, with Daphni, Omnes Capital and Ovni Capital. The two-year-old startup HQ’d in Paris has built a geological AI platform that combines foundational models with deep subsurface science to locate critical mineral deposits like copper, lithium, and nickel faster than conventional exploration, targeting a market where over 1,000 new deposits need to be found by 2040 to supply EV and AI infrastructure demand.

EVA | €35M | 🎮 Gaming

EVA raised €35 million with Raise Invest to back an accelerated international push. EVA runs free-roaming VR arenas—physical venues where groups navigate shared immersive environments simultaneously, and has opened 70+ locations across 10 countries in five years using a franchise model. Germany and Spain have been idntified as the next strategic markets for EVA which is targeting an expansion to 100 locations.

LegalPlace | €70M | ⚖️ Legaltech

Paris-based LegalPlace, which handles business creation and accounting services for freelancers and SMEs, raised €70 million from Move Capital, XAnge and Eurazeo, and simultaneously acquired rival Legalstart. The combined entity now handles close to 20% of company formations in France and is targeting €100 million in revenue this year, with further European expansion and an AI agent for business administration both in the pipeline.

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Quiz Answer: D.) AI Infrastructure

…by A LOT. Aside from semiconductors, which is also pulling in larger overall funding amounts, the rest of the Seed round sector map actually looks surprisingly normal—with valuations and round sized clustered around the median.