In this edition of La Machine:

🧠 Anthropic's Guillaume Princen, the former Stripe executive, was hired earlier this year to be Anthropic's Head of EMEA. He spoke with us about sovereignty, vibe coding, and why the Model Context Protocol has catalyzed the agentic era. Read more here.

🧠 ASML’s €1.3B stake in Mistral AI signals Europe’s boldest play yet to compete with U.S. AI giants, uniting the continent’s semiconductor crown jewel with its fastest-rising AI star in a bid for technological sovereignty. Read more here.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

Headlines

🗞️ A Mistral Of Controversy Blows Through French Tech | Given the recent buzz, it wouldn’t be right to start this week without talking Mistral. Again. France’s AI unicorn is now valued at $14B, despite not making a cent in profit. Enter Gabriel Zucman, the economist behind a proposed 2% wealth tax on fortunes above €100M. His solution for startup founders sitting on paper billions but little cash? Pay “in nature." In other words, by handing shares of their companies to the state. That would make the French government a de facto shareholder in unicorns like Mistral, deciding whether to hold or flip equity just like a VC fund. The catch is that startup shares are famously illiquid, other investors hate surprise cap table reshuffles, and no one’s quite sure France Inc. (outside of state bank Bpifrance, of course) wants to play portfolio manager. Add to this Finance Committee chair Éric Coquerel\Business' confusion over valuations vs. salaries, and you get social media meltdowns, furious founders, and one more reason why tax reform and tech don’t mix easily. | Les Echos, Maddyness

🗞️ Quandela Goes Quantum With Mila | French photonic quantum darling Quandela (See our profile here) is teaming up with Montréal’s Mila institute, Yoshua Bengio’s AI powerhouse, to push the frontier of quantum machine learning. The goal is to build and benchmark QML models to see where quantum actually beats classical approaches, moving beyond hype into hard data. Part of the work will stress-test real hardware, not just simulations, to find out whether quantum advantage is more than just a PowerPoint buzzword. Quandela has been busy: launching its MerLin framework for hybrid AI–quantum prototyping and experimenting with fraud detection tools alongside AdvanThink. This latest deal also deepens its Canadian footprint, after planting a quantum computer in an EDF Exaion data center and opening offices in Montréal and Sherbrooke. Next milestones: logical qubits by year’s end and networked quantum machines by 2028. France bets that photons, plus AI, could be the real quantum leap. | Usine Digitale

🗞️ China’s SpikingBrain Fires Up The AI Race | While French founders wrestle with taxes, Chinese researchers are busy rewiring AI itself. Their new model, SpikingBrain, mimics the way biological neurons fire. In tests, it crushed classic LLMs by being up to 100x more efficient. Instead of lighting up an entire neural net at once, its “neurons” only activate when triggered, making it both faster and dramatically less data-hungry. That’s no small deal when the internet itself is running out of fresh text to feed today’s giants. SpikingBrain reportedly trained on less than 2% of the data needed for a conventional model while matching performance - and it’s even open source on GitHub. Optimized for chips beyond Nvidia’s scarce GPUs, the approach points toward a neuromorphic future where AI runs leaner, greener, and brainier. Europe may want to take note: the next frontier isn’t just bigger, it’s smarter. | Futura Sciences

🗞️ Vinted’s AI Closet Cleanout Gets Messy | France’s favorite second-hand app is facing a very 2025 problem: listings polished -  or outright faked - by AI. Instead of snapping a wrinkled dress on a hanger, sellers are now prompting tools to spit out glossy shots with flawless lighting and model-ready bodies. The catch? Sometimes the “second-hand” item looks nothing like what arrives in the mail… if it arrives at all. Even worse, AI imagery is helping flood the platform with brand-new fast-fashion stock from Shein, Temu, and AliExpress, resold at markups under the guise of vintage finds. That’s not just against the spirit of Vinted’s “vide-dressing” culture - in France, it can cross into illegal dropshipping when fraud is involved. Officially, Vinted says it tolerates AI for touch-ups or face-blurring, but draws the line at misleading posts. In practice, enforcement is patchy, leaving users wondering: Is that chic blazer really a thrift gem, or just a phantom fit conjured by Midjourney? | RTL

🗞️ Europe’s AI Algorithm Timeout: Minors May Be Banned From Social Media | The EU is aiming for the recommendation engines behind TikTok, Instagram, and more, warning that their AI-driven feeds exploit children’s vulnerabilities. Ursula von der Leyen is pushing for a minimum age requirement, inspired by Australia, with France and several other member states on board for a 15+ limit. Platforms will need robust age-verification systems — or risk losing a chunk of their teen audience (and ad revenue). It’s a bold attempt to put algorithmic accountability before engagement metrics, but enforcing it could be as tricky as telling a teenager to log off. Europe’s message is clear: AI may rule your feed, but it won’t rule your kids — at least not legally. | Usine Digitale

ICYMI

🗞️ How Alpic Is Building Model Context Protocol (MCP) Infrastructure For A New Agentic Internet | The Paris-based company has raised $6M to help companies deploy MCP servers for a world where AI agents, not humans, navigate digital services. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ Bad bots or agentic misalignment? When AI appears to go rogue | AI systems are getting smart and independent. But what happens when they start making decisions we didn’t intend? A new Anthropic study reveals how even well-aligned models can go off-script. We spoke with ReciTAL CEO Gilles Moyse about the risks of agentic misalignment. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ Cathay Innovation's $1B Bet On Rewiring Venture Capital For The AI Age | Denis Barrier, Co-Founder of Cathay Innovation, explains how the new fund challenges Silicon Valley's model by focusing on collaboration that connects AI startups directly with corporate giants to transform industries rather than disrupt them in an era where 'everybody has to play.' | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ Photonic Chip Startup Arago Wants to Cut AI's Massive Energy Appetite by 90% | A year-old French company claims its light-powered processors could slash data center power consumption while keeping warehouse robots running all day instead of just one hour. | The French Tech Journal

🧠 Anthropic's Guillaume Princen: 'The building blocks of the digital economy are now as simple as having a conversation.'

Anthropic's recent $13 billion Series F round brought its valuation to $183 billion, the last sign of the escalating global AI arms race. The company plans to use the funding to scale enterprise products, expand globally, and deepen research on AI safety.

However, that international expansion was already well underway. Earlier this year, the company hired Guillaume Princen to be Head of EMEA. Princen will lead the company's expansion across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Princen brings over 20 years of experience in high-growth technology environments, with expertise spanning revenue, product, operations, strategy, and international expansion.

I had a chance to speak with Princen back in July at the Raise Summit in Paris. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

"What I'm seeing in the market today, the trust element is extremely important for companies in this region, more than elsewhere in the world," Princen said. "We are in a business of trust here in EMEA, especially in AI, and that is something that customers value a lot.

🧠 The Unlikely Alliance: Europe's Chip Giant ASML Makes A Billion Euro Wager On Mistral AI

Mistral AI's record-breaking €1.7 billion funding round catapulted the startup to an €11.7 billion valuation, making it France's first decacorn and turning its three founders into billionaires.

But the surprising star of this funding round was the lead investor: ASML, the Dutch company that has quietly become the invisible backbone of the global technology industry.

ASML's €1.3 billion investment secured an 11% stake and made it Mistral's largest shareholder. The unlikely alliance signals a strategic shift that could reshape Europe's position in the AI arms race.

It's a calculated gamble on European technological sovereignty, orchestrated by one of the continent's most powerful yet least understood tech giants.

AI Funding News

📇 Company: Mistral AI
🔍 Description: Developing the best generative AI models
💻 Website: mistral.ai
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Series C
💰 Amount Raised: €1,818.18M
🏦 Investors: Index Ventures; Lightspeed Venture Partners; General Catalyst; ASML; Bpifrance; Andreessen Horowitz; DST Global; Nvidia
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Guillaume Lample; Timothée Lacroix; Arthur Mensch
🗞️ News: Reuters

📇 Company: Gobano Robotics
🔍 Description: French robotics AI startup leveraging imitation learning and reinforcement learning to make robots more adaptable and capable of performing complex tasks, moving beyond traditional rigid programming.
💻 Website: gobano.ai
📍 HQ City: Boulogne-Billancourt
🧗 Round: Pre-seed
💰 Amount Raised: €3 million
🏦 Investors: Axeleo Capital, Bpifrance, Polytechnique Ventures, Kima Ventures, Motier Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Ziad Khoury (ex-founder of Padam Mobility, acquired by Siemens Mobility), Roch Molléro (PhD in AI, ex-Wandercraft)
🗞️ News: The funding will support R&D on Gobano’s software layer for robotic arms, with the goal of enabling them to perform variable, complex tasks such as sorting, assembly, and screwing—paving the way for more versatile automation in factories and warehouses. | Les Echos

📇 Company: Manitty
🔍 Description: French digital health startup behind DeepMo, a wearable AI-powered health intelligence platform providing real-time monitoring, anomaly detection, and predictive medical support across healthcare and defense applications.
💻 Website: manitty.com
📍 HQ City: Lyon
🧗 Round: NATO DIANA Phase 2 selection (grant & accelerator program)
💰 Amount Raised: Up to €300,000 in NATO DIANA Phase 2 funding support
🏦 Investors/Partners: NATO DIANA (Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic)
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Blasquez Philippe
🗞️ News: Manitty is the only French company and only digital health innovator selected among 15 winners (out of 2,600 applicants) for NATO DIANA Phase 2. The funding and program access will help scale DeepMo’s deployment in extreme environments, validate defence use cases, and accelerate adoption across healthcare and military ecosystems. | LinkedIn, Euractiv

📇 Company: Zylio
🔍 Description: SaaS/AI startup automating indirect procurement by using an autonomous AI agent to analyze unstructured documents (quotes, invoices, purchase orders), enforce price compliance, detect anomalies, and help companies save money and time in procurement decisions.
💻 Website: Zylio
📍 HQ City: Courbevoie
🧗 Round: N/A
💰 Amount Raised: N/A
🏦 Investors: Ilan Benhaim, MFOUNDERS
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Tarik Aitakkaouali, Bertrand Dumast, Younès Samir, Oussama Kandakji
🗞️ News: Startupresearcher

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