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.

Playing not to lose 🏒

Something bothered me while reading new French digital minister Anne Le Hénaff’s first interview with Maddyness. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until today.

Anyone who has played a competitive sport has experienced the difference between two distinct styles of play: offensive and defensive. When your side is embracing offense you are in control of the outcome. Your team sets the cadence, sets up the plays, and connects the dots to score.

Playing from a purely defensive mindset, on the other hand, quickly leads to a self-defeating loop. You’re forced to continually react to your opponent, never able to set or execute on your own strategy.

Le Hénaff’s first message to French startups was essentially one of defense.

Take this quote about Mistral:

“We are already fortunate to have Mistral, a champion with a promising future in Europe and perhaps even globally. Now we need to bring other promising startups to a level of development high enough to ultimately attract users from other European countries.”

At the core of this message is the idea that the very best French startups, if they work very hard, hire and retain the best talent, raise the most capital, and are supported by the French government might be able to win…in Europe. But not globally.

This is the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose.

Ironically for a country that once created a global empire by expanding rather carelessly around the world, the leaders of France now have their sights set only on home.

For founders with bigger ambitions, this misalignment between their goals and the Euro-centric views of a government that is heavily involved in France’s tech sector puts the two at odds.

Some founders resolve this misalignment by relocating to the US—like Formal founder Mokhtar Bacha, who decided to leave France and build his company in San Francisco and shared his experience in a recent LinkedIn post.

Others, like Formance’s Anne-Sybille Pradelles and Clément Salaün, have taken a different approach by splitting their teams and building product from France while selling into the US market from their NYC office.

France’s best founders are going to the US one way or another. If Le Hénaff wants to make good on her call for them to “restez” the French government will need to raise their ambitions to match the founders’ and start playing to win rather than doubling down on defense.

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

📝 Quiz: What % of Station F’s 2025 Future 40 class list AI & Machine Learning as a sector of operations?

(answer at the bottom of the newsletter)

• A.) 40%

• B.) 57%

• C.) 82%

• D.) 100%

What’s new this week in 🇫🇷

• 📌 Anthropic to open a new office in Paris: The American AI startup behind the popular Claude model announced it will open two new European offices in Paris and in Munich following 9X growth in Europe in the past year. The Paris office will be led by former Google Managing Director Thomas Remy.

• 💸 Doctolib fined €4.6 million by The Autorité de la Concurrence: The penalty for “anticompetitive behavior” stemmed from an investigation launched in 2019 by Cegedim Santé (who were themselves fined €800K in 2024 for unauthorized processing of health data).

• 🏝️ Nvidia to invest up to $1 billion into AI startup Poolside: The company, which once announced and then reneged on a promise to relocate its HQ to Paris, creates coding automation tools targeted to government and defense customers.

• 💰 Station F companies passed €1 billion raised in 2025: the announcement marks the third year in a row that companies based in Station F have reached the 10-figure funding mark.

• 🇫🇷 French Tech 2030 announced its 2025 cohort of 80 startups: the companies span industries from aerospace to infrastructure, quantum computing, and (of course) AI.

  

  Congrats to this year’s Future 40!

🌍 Headlines from around the world

• 🇪🇺 EU mulls AI Act pullback to catch up in AI race (Semafor)

• 👻 Perplexity will pay Snap $400M to power their in-app search (TechCrunch)

• 🇺🇸 OpenAI faces backlash after asking US government to support data center build outs (Bloomberg)

• 🛰️ Google plans to launch AI data centers into space (ARS Technica)

• 👷 Meta plans to spend $600B on AI infrastructure in the next three years (SilionANGLE)

• 🤑 Tesla shareholders approve pay package for Elon Musk totaling close to $1 trillion (CNBC)

• 🚔 Meta projected 10% of revenue last year would come from scams and sales of banned goods (Reuters)

• 🥊 Sequoia has new leadership after ousting Roelof Botha (FT)

• 💵 Ripple raised $500M at a $40B valuation (TechCrunch)

New Funding 💶

9 companies announced €108.9M in new funding last week

Upcoming Events 🗓

• Google AI Founders Studio – November 12-28

• Neurons and Peppers #2 – November 12

• Tectonic European Defense Summit – November 12-13

• Paris Meetup | fal x Hugging Face x BFL – November 13

• 🆕 Afterflow : L'afterwork Webflow – November 13

• 🆕 GitLab Epic Conference Paris – November 13

• Paris AI Hackathon @StationF by Pioneers – November 15

• 🆕 Iterate, Paris Hackathon – November 15-16

• 🆕 Entrepreneurship Festival 2025 Paris – November 18

• 🆕 Hackathon, Agents IA pour la Découverte Scientifique – November 19

• 🆕 Paris vLLM Meetup – November 19

• 🆕 Women of SaaS Paris: Leverage AI to Accelerate Your Career – November 20

• 🆕 The Blueprint for scaling AI Support: live in Paris – December 4

• 🆕 ai-PULSE by Scaleway – December 4

Interesting Jobs 👩‍💻

• 🚲 Product Manager @ Upway

• 🧠 Business Planning & Strategy @ Alan

• 💻 Head of Developer Experience @ Mistral

• 🧭 Founders Associate @ Steerlab

• 🧬 Senior Director of Business Development @ Bioptimus

• ✈️ Product Director, Travel @ Swile

• 🎓 Business Strategy and Analytics Intern @ Electra

• 📣 Senior Product Marketing Manager, B2B @ Mistral

• 📚 Education Content Lead @ Pennylane

• 🎓 Early Careers: Software Engineering & Machine Learning @ Nabla

• 🎓 Strategy & Corporate Development Internship @ Pasqal

• 🎓 Strategy & Business Intelligence Internship @ Greenly

What Else I’m Reading 📚

• Why aren’t smart people happier? (Seeds of Science)

• How Many Stocks Outperform the Stock Market? (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Mission Probabl: The Quest to Transform French AI Research into A Tech Champion (French Tech Journal)

Newsletter Recommendations 🫶

Quiz Answer: C.) 82%

Or 82.5% if we’re being precise. 33/40 companies listed AI or machine learning as a sector of operations.