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 🇫🇷

👋 H Company loses its last remaining cofounder

And suddenly there were none. Laurent Sifre, the last remaining original cofounder of Paris-based frontier AI lab H, has stepped down as CTO to take on a non-operational "head of scientific council" role. H, or H Company, was one of the most-watched bets in European AI after raising a €210 million seed round, then the largest in Europe, to launch their ambitions of competing on frontier AI research. Even in those early days, employees I spoke with seemed confused by what the company was actually creating—aside from increasingly high expectations.

H now focused on creating AI agents, including Holo Tab, a consumer focused AI agent that runs on top of Google Chrome, to an incredibly broad range of business use cases from loan approvals to inventory management. Ironically, in a headline from November last year current H CEO Gautier Clox told Euronews Next that he thinks “the talent is here. The question is, how do we retain talent and data?” Since then, H has lost all of its remaining original cofounders. While Clox was talking about retaining talent in Europe, the same question could now be asked of H itself.

⏳️ IP…no: Ledger puts its planned public listing on pause

Ledger has put its planned US IPO on hold, citing deteriorating market conditions for crypto listings. The company had already hired Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, and Barclays to lead what was expected to be a $4 billion listing but stopped short of filing a draft S-1 with the SEC which would have disclosed financial information about the company leading up to the IPO.

The crypto hardware wallet maker is reportedly exploring private fundraising alternatives while it waits for conditions to improve. Ledger is not the only crypto business to press pause on the public markets this year. Crypto exchange Kraken also postponed their planned IPO for similar reasons. The two companies may have a point as BitGo, this year’s only crypto-native IPO, is currently trading 36% below its January listing price.

🙋‍♂️ Quiz: According to Carta, what % of Pre-Seed funding went to AI companies in Q1, 26?

(answer at the bottom of the newsletter)

• A.) 25%

• B.) 50%

• C.) 75%

• D.) 85%

🌍 Headlines around the world

• 🚨 Anthropic is reportedly raising at a ~$950 billion valuation the same week it has overtaken OpenAI among business customers for the first time according to Ramp spend data (Wall Street Journal)

• Helsing unicorn valuation

• 📈 Cerebras Systems priced its IPO at $185 per share, raising $5.55 billion at a $56 billion fully diluted valuation as investor appetite for AI infrastructure intensifies (CNBC)

• 💊 Isomorphic Labs, the Google DeepMind AI drug discovery spinout, raised $2.1 billion in a Series B round led by Thrive Capital, MGX, and Temasek (Reuters)

• 🪖 Defense tech Anduril raised a $5 billion Series H at a $61 billion post-money valuation, doubling its value in under a year (TechCrunch)

• 🧠 Recursive Superintelligence raised $650 million at a $4 billion valuation from Google Ventures, Nvidia, and AMD to build AI systems capable of improving themselves (New York Times)

• 💻 UK chip startup Fractile raised $220 million in a Series B led by Accel, Founders Fund, and Factorial Funds to accelerate AI inference speeds (Wall Street Journal)

• 🤝 n8n doubled its valuation to $5.2 billion after SAP bought a stake and agreed to embed its workflow automation platform inside their AI agent builder (Bloomberg)

• 🌋 Geothermal startup Fervo Energy surged 33% in its Nasdaq debut, pushing its valuation past $10 billion on booming AI data center electricity demand (TechCrunch)

• ⚖️ Sam Altman testified in the Musk vs. OpenAI trial that Elon Musk once suggested OpenAI should pass to his children if he died (TechCrunch)

• ✂️ LinkedIn is cutting approximately 875 employees or 5% of its workforce as Microsoft reorganizes teams despite 12% revenue growth (Reuters)

• 🛡️ Anthropic refused a Chinese think tank tied to Beijing access to its unreleased Mythos AI model, which U.S. officials view as a strategic national security asset (New York Times)

• ✈️ Trump traveled to China with Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and a last-minute Jensen Huang to negotiate on tech and AI (New York Times)

Meet the college-aged founders ‘interning’ at the company they started

There is an echo of its revolutionary history that still reverberates throughout France. Inside of every French citizen an ember of that disruptive spirit smolders. Today, this vestige of a time when they overthrew kings and institutions sparks to life to wage battle against bureaucracy and expectations. That revolutionary disposition is how you end up with young founders “interning” at their own companies to fulfill their university-mandated work requirements. It’s how you end up with Sirine Larbi and Louis Brouqueyre, the co-founders of Kylmb.

Louis and Sirine first met in university and went on to work together on growth at Revyze, a buzzy startup at the intersection of short form video and education that rocketed to over 1 million users—in large part thanks to highly successful social media marketing. Other app founders took notice and requests to take on freelance growth projects began to appear in Sirine and Louis’ Instagram DMs. It wasn’t long before they decided to team up again and began building Klymb as an influencer marketing agency for consumer apps. Right away Louis took a one-year leave of absence from Emlyon Business School to go all in on the bourgeoning company. Sirine followed, classifying her work at Klymb as “an internship.”

We’re going to be millionaires

From day one, the timer was ticking on their one year countdown until Louis’ leave of absence ended. The two founders also set a second, faster deadline that would determine whether they continued working on Klymb full time or went back to school. If they couldn’t reach a target amount of revenue by then they would end the adventure early.

Within the first two weeks they were already off to a promising start with two large contracts from French mobile apps to run influencer campaigns.

“We projected it out and were thinking it’s going to be crazy. By next December were going to be millionaires” they told me.

Scaling is rarely that easy, which they soon discovered. However, the mounting challenges did little to dissuade the young founders. As Sirine said, “we didn’t achieve our target at all but we still decided to continue. We just loved what we're doing so it just wasn't an option to change. We knew it was something that was going to work, but we also learned it was going to be harder than what we imagined.”

Sirine and Louis estimate the early traction contributed ~5% to their decision to continue working on Klymb. The other 95% came from love of the game and a joy in waking up every day working on something that was 100% their own.

Not everyone saw it that choice with such certainty. Especially when speaking with older generations Klymb's founders were often met with skepticism. Amongst their peers though the response has been enthusiastic—probably in part because seemingly all of their classmates are building something thanks to generative AI.

As Sirine and Louis told me, on one hand AI has dropped the barriers to entry while on the other it makes entrepreneurship seem comparatively less risky because of the way AI threatens to disrupt traditional career paths. Louis put it this way, "in the beginning, some people warned against pursuing Klymb by asking things like how do you know in two years it's going to work out? We kinda laugh about it, especially with AI. Even with a ‘normal job’ you don't know what's going to happen in two years anyway."

Nine months and 7,000 ads later

Today, Klymb is approaching its one-year birthday and has produced more than 7,000 ads for companies like Voodoo, Homa Games, and Airlearn. Getting there wasn't a straightforward path though.

Early on they said yes to every opportunity and kept adding freelancers to keep up with the increasing work demands, operating on the assumption that more creators meant more coverage and infinite leverage. What they quickly discovered is that volume doesn't behave the way you'd expect in a creative industry. 

"With 10 videos it works naturally that if you have 10 different people you can get 10 different angles and 10 unique videos. With 200 videos though you still end up with essentially 10 different videos” Sirine told me. Left to their own devices, creators default to the same obvious interpretations of a brief which neutralizes the scale advantage of larger campaigns.

The fix was to shift their focus from adding more people to adding more structure. Klymb hired a creative strategist and began experimenting with the way they sourced, briefed, and guided their creators while using the rapid feedback cycles of social media to ground their decisions in data and quickly make adjustments.

What they figured out in that process is now what separates Klymb from most of the agencies they compete against. To maintain quality at scale requires the right balance of creative freedom and strategic guidance. Too much freedom counterintuitively leads back to the lack of variety problem mentioned earlier while too much control kills the chance of outlier performance. To navigate this balance, creators who work with Klymb are no longer treated as execution resources but are brought into strategy sessions early, consulted for their platform-specific expertise, and given enough latitude to make something that feels like it belongs on TikTok, Instagram, etc. rather than something that was clearly produced by a brand.

Working with clients in different categories also means those learnings have started to accumulate. What converts well for a dating app gets tried for a finance app, then for a wellness brand. With each campaign Klymb adds to their growing library of insights for what works on each social platform. Most importantly, because they are constantly iterating their knowledge stays current—not an easy feat in the ever shifting world of social media trends.

I asked Sirine and Louis to share the “secret sauce” behind social media success and view on what works might frustrate brands that have spent serious money on production quality. On social, authenticity still beats aesthetics. If a video doesn't belong in a regular person's feed it won't perform there regardless of the production quality or budget. "We don't want big logos or screen recordings. We want something that feels native and that's actually entertaining. Sometimes that means the video doesn’t look ‘good’, but then what doesn’t look good actually performs."

The past year hasn't been without its hard moments. Klymb's founders described a pattern familiar to most early-stage founders of extreme highs and lows, often within 24 hours of each other. The first time going through that cycle felt a bit like the world was ending. But, much like their approach to content creation with its rapid learning cycles, after a few iterations overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds Louis and Sirine now know what to expect. “Now we've experienced that it's way easier to understand when we're in a bad cycle we know that it's going end at some point. When everything is going wrong, just continue to work.”

New Funding 💶

Five companies announced €66.5M in new funding last week.

Upcoming Events 🗓

• VivaTech Startup Meetup - Be Global from Day One: Lessons from Founders — May 19

• European Defense Tech Meetup, Paris – May 19

• 🆕 t/o coffee #5 — May 20

• WHYC? Demo Night - Paris Edition — May 21

• 🆕 Prompt Club x Kling AI — May 21

• 🆕 MCP Connect Paris — May 26

• Contech Connect @ Station F – May 28

• Pitch Night à Station F — May 28

• 🆕 Cursor Meetup Paris — May 28

• 🆕 Codex Community Meetup, Paris — May 29

• Women In Research: AI In Insights Night (Verso x Dynata) — June 2

• 🆕 CTO Voices x "Hello, AI speaking" — June 3

• VivaTech 2026 – June 17-20

• INSEAD AI Forum, Paris – June 22-23

• Startup School Paris — June 27-29

• INSEAD LaunchPad Demo Day – June 30

Interesting Jobs 👩‍💻

• 📣 Product Marketing Manager @ Payplug

• 🌍 Head of Growth @ BeReal

• 🤝 Channel Development Manager @ Canva

• 💼 Product Manager @ Adaptive ML

• 📣 Integrated Marketing Manager - B2C @ Ledger

• 📊 Team Lead, Revenue Marketing @ Adyen

• 🤖 Generative Media AI Lead, EMEA @ Google

What Else I’m Reading 📚

• What do other animals think of human music (Howtown)

• Estimating AI productivity gains (Anthropic)

• What will be scarce? (Alex Imas)

Newsletter Recommendations 🫶

Quiz Answer: B.) 50%

Granted, this data is US-only. Across all Q1, ‘26 deals in France 31% funding went to AI deals. As I noted at the time, even that figure is deceptive since I only counted companies with AI as their primary focus. The true figure was probably somewhere between 90%-100% since nearly every startup is incorporating AI into their products.