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  • 🇫🇷 French Tech Updates — November 25, 2025. €143.2M in new funding for French companies.

🇫🇷 French Tech Updates — November 25, 2025. €143.2M in new funding for French companies.

What you need to know this week in France: 🇪🇺 AI Act delays, 💰 €650M new life sciences fund, ✈️ French investors in SF, 👋 meet Well—a startup you should know.

Author

James Saulsky
November 25, 2025

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 🇫🇷

  • 💰 Sofinnova closes €650M life sciences fund: the Paris-based investor’s new flagship fund will back early-stage biopharma and medtech startups tackling unmet clinical needs across Europe and North America.

  • 🌉 Frst opens San Francisco outpost: it’s a rare case of French investors entering the US while retaining their Paris HQ. There, they will continue deploying their €96 million fund III to back early stage founders.

  • 🇪🇺 EU delays key AI Act rules to 2027: Brussels will push back implementation of “high-risk” AI use cases like biometric ID and job screening by more than a year, citing the need to simplify tech regulation and respond to Big Tech pushback.

🌍 Headlines from around the world

  • 💸 Prediction markets startup Kalshi raises $1B in funding (FinSMEs)

  • ☢️ Constellation Energy secures a $1B loan to revive the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant (CNBC)

  • 🖌️ Adobe acquires Semrush for $1.9B (Adobe)

  • 👩‍⚖️ Meta defeats antitrust case over Instagram, WhatsApp acquisitions (Reuters)

  • 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia Backs Elon Musk’s xAI With Data Center Deal (NYT)

  • 🤝 Anthropic valued in range of $350 billion following investment deal with Microsoft, Nvidia (CNBC)

  • 🤖 Jeff Bezos is putting $6.2 billion and himself as co-CEO of new AI startup (Yahoo Finance)

  • 💰 Leaked documents shed light into how much OpenAI pays Microsoft (TechCrunch)

Startup to watch – Well: the spreadsheet killer built in France

Outside of the accounting profession, very few (if any) founders started their business with a goal of spending their time chasing down receipts and copy-pasting numbers into a spreadsheet. As anyone running their own company knows, this is what happens anyway. For the 26 million small businesses in Europe, that means their leaders are essentially working as reluctant accountants one day per month to catch up on their finances. As painful as that lost time is, the hours spent matching receipts to expenses and verifying transactions are only part of the problem.

The second, even worse issue is that all these isolated pieces of information obscure the answers to simple, but critical questions. Questions like “how long is my runway?” or “how much am I spending?” Running a business without knowing these answers is like driving a car with your eyes closed—and often leads to similar results. Up to 90% of young companies fail before they reach their 10th birthday and running out of money is a major factor in those failures.

Well is an 8-month-old startup creating a platform to reverse this grim statistic.

Well’s founders Maxime Champoux and Bastien Blanc are well versed in solving financial problems for SMEs. As early employees at iBanFirst, Qonto, and Fintecture, the two of them have built out core banking infrastructure multiple times for small business customers. With Well, they aim to go one step further—reshaping the way SMEs manage their finances.

Or, as Maxime put it, they are building the AI-native spreadsheet killer.

Well is built around three insights:

  1. Intelligence is becoming a commodity, but data is not.

  2. SMEs don’t store data in one place. The data is stored in their the tools they use.

  3. For AI to take actions, context is everything and context comes from data.

Each of these insights starts with or comes back to data, and this is where Well got started too.

With their Capture and Extract tools, Well lets SMEs connect previously isolated data sources like email, messaging, invoicing, and vendor portals to automatically retrieve financial documents and form a unified data lake—all automatically.

The way Maxime sees it, “if you want intelligence on your finances, you need all of your data. Drag-and-drop makes that basically impossible for small businesses. The idea is minimum friction, minimum manipulation. You keep using your tools and we get the data from there.”

Once the data is imported, Well cleans, categorizes, and enriches it to form one cohesive body of information. “We’re very inspired by Attio. You open it and the data is beautiful. We want that feeling for financial data,” explained Maxime.

This foundation of complete, context-packed data then opens up a whole world of possibilities.

Imagine tracking your burn rate, subscription spending, or unit economics per customer just by chatting with your data the same way you would talk with a CFO. Or using natural language to generate a customized report for your investors—all done with accurate context on your business and data you can trust.

As impressive as this already is, for Well it’s just the beginning of what’s possible. Soon, they expect to go beyond generating insights and into actions with agentic AI for financial tasks.

“There’s a big difference between generating insights and doing actions. If an agent doesn’t know a supplier must be paid in sixty days instead of thirty, it can’t process the payment. So we focused on the context first.”

❝

“The first thing we understood is that intelligence is a commodity. But data is not.”

Maxime Champoux, Co-Founder @ Well

While they are now targeting international expansion, Well is one of a few kinds of businesses that actually benefits from having its roots in Europe. As Maxime told me, “regulatory pressure in Europe is higher, so traction came faster here.” That initial traction enabled Well to build their user and revenue base and stack additional value on top of the data collection features. “Now that we have a value proposition above regulatory needs, this can hit the U.S.”

If all goes according to plan, Well is on the path to building a second brain for business—a place where every decision, document, invoice, payment, message, and workflow is stored, understood, and acted upon. This new infrastructure will then become the starting point that every future financial tool plugs into.

All together, that certainly makes Well a startup to watch.

New Funding 💶

16 companies announced €143.2M in new funding last week including €450K by Notoxsurf (🏄‍♀️ Sports Equipment) and €300K by Ivyspec (🤖 Robotics).

Aphasix | €1M | 🗣️ HealthTech

Paris-based Aphasix has raised €1 million in seed funding from angel investors to develop its AI-powered platform that helps people with aphasia regain their speech. Co-founded by a stroke survivor, the startup offers adaptive speech therapy exercises that respond to user progress and pronunciation.

Exwayz | €1M | 🤖 Robotics

Paris-based Exwayz has raised €1 million to develop its 3D SLAM software for autonomous systems, with backing from CentraleSupélec Venture and a France 2030 grant. The startup’s tech stitches lidar data into high-precision city maps and runs directly on robots, making it a plug-and-play solution for positioning and navigation.

Elefantia | €1.05M | 📱 Social Media

Rennes-based Elefantia has raised €1.05 million in its first funding round led by OneRagtime with additional backing from several business angels. The startup helps people capture and share their personal stories across generations, pairing users with trained young “Elefantos” to assist in recording memories.

Revolt.eco | €3M | 🌱 ClimateTech

Revolt.eco has raised €3 million in a mix of equity and debt to expand its SaaS platform for renewable energy professionals. The software streamlines project management and boosts transparency for energy retrofits to improve customer trust and combat installer inefficiencies. Backed by Revent and angel investors, the company is now targeting new sectors and countries.

LaFraise | €3.2M | 🦷 HealthTech

Paris-based LaFraise, founded by five former Doctolib employees, has raised €3.2 million in its first round to bring AI into dentists’ offices. Its software automates quote tracking, admin work, and compliance, freeing up dentists to focus on patient care. Already used by 1,200 dentists in France, the platform sees 250 new users monthly and over 30,000 treatments accepted online since launch.

MuchBetter.ai | €4M | 📚 Edtech

Paris-based MuchBetter.ai has raised €4 million to scale its AI-powered training platform for sales and field teams. The software lets employees practise conversations with virtual customers and get real-time feedback, helping companies like Bouygues Telecom and La Poste ramp up onboarding and performance. With backing from Educapital, the startup is pushing to personalize training paths and track skills across entire organizations.

AI-Stroke | $4M | 🧠 Healthtech

Paris-based AI-Stroke has raised €4 million ($4.6 million) in a seed round led by Newfund’s BrainTech fund Heka, alongside Bpifrance and angel investors. The startup is developing an AI neurologis” that helps emergency responders detect strokes via a smartphone video, identifying symptoms like facial asymmetry and slurred speech before any CT scan. Built on a dataset of 20,000 annotated videos, AI-Stroke claims to have doubled stroke detection rates in early studies.

Aive | €4.5M | 🎥 AI

Paris-based Aive has extended its Series A round to €16.5 million with a new €4.5 million injection to support global expansion. The startup's platform uses AI to automatically generate multiple versions of a video tailored for different formats, languages, and platforms—already used by big names like LVMH, Stellantis, and Meta. The funding will also go toward opening a co-creation space and hiring 30 new staff, as Aive positions itself as a creative tech partner rather than a content killer.

Rift | €4.6M | 🛡️ Defense

Paris-based Rift has raised €4.6 million to build Europe's first on-demand aerial intelligence network using autonomous VTOL drones and a proprietary software platform. The system is designed to replace expensive helicopter-based surveillance with 24/7 drone coverage that can be operated remotely.

Leanspace | €10M | 🛰️ Space

Strasbourg-based Leanspace has raised €10 million in a Series A round to expand its software platform for satellite and ground segment operations. The startup helps spacecraft operators—from startups to space agencies—manage missions with more agility and lower costs through software-defined infrastructure. With backing from ISAI Cap Venture, Capgemini, and Qwaltec, Leanspace is now targeting larger, security-sensitive programs in Europe and the U.S.

Hummink | €15M | ⚙️ DeepTech

Paris-based Hummink has raised €15 million to scale its nanoprinting tech that lets manufacturers repair microelectronics defects with surgical precision. Its High-Precision Capillary Printing system acts like a microscopic fountain pen, enabling sub-micron material deposition to boost chip and display yields. Founded in 2020 as a spin-off from ENS-PSL and CNRS, Hummink is now working with major display makers and plans to double its workforce and revenue by 2026.

NcodiN | €16M | 🔬 DeepTech

Paris-based NcodiN has raised €16 million in a seed round led by MIG Capital to tackle one of AI hardware’s biggest headaches: the bottleneck of chip interconnects. The startup replaces short-distance copper wiring with silicon-integrated photonic links—using tiny lasers to move more data faster and with less energy. With plans to open a U.S. office and industrialize its nanolaser tech, NcodiN wants to put Europe back on the map in a space dominated by American players.

HyPrSpace | €21M | 🚀 Aerospace

HyPrSpace has raised a €21 million Series A round. The Bordeaux-based company is developing patented hybrid propulsion technology and launch services for both suborbital and orbital missions space. Backed by Bpifrance’s France 2030 plan, the funding supports final motor qualification, a first suborbital flight in France, and industrial rollout. Their engine tech blends solid and liquid propulsion, which should mean it's simpler, safer, and cheaper to build. The funding comes amid a broader push in France to strengthen sovereign access to space for both civil and defense needs.

GetVocal | €22.5M | 💬 AI

Paris-based GetVocal has raised €22.5 million ($26 million) in a Series A round led by Creandum to scale its AI-driven customer service platform across Europe. Founded in 2023, the startup helps companies like like Vodafone and Glovo build hybrid human-AI agent teams by integrating AI with their internal workflows and compliance processes.

Deblock | €30M | 🪙 Crypto

Paris-based Deblock has raised €30 million from investors including Speedinvest, Commerzbank, and Latitude to build what it calls the first fully on-chain bank. Launched in 2024, the startup blends a regulated French IBAN account with a self-managed crypto wallet, and claims over 300,000 users. Deblock is licensed as an electronic money institution and holds France’s first MiCA authorization. The funds will go toward developing hybrid TradFi-DeFi products, European expansion, and building out blockchain-native banking infrastructure.

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