🧮 Data Point: Vive Le Vibe Coding!

According to a new analysis of Google search data, France ranks seventh globally for interest in the buzzy coding concept known as "vibe coding," with 33.53 searches per 100,000 residents. The study was conducted by vibe marketing website LeadsNavi. Hey, 7th place is not bad for a country that often gets dunked on for debating AI regulation rather than chasing the latest dev trend. Unlike smaller tech hubs such as Malta or Luxembourg, France combines strong per-capita interest with a large overall search volume. In other words, this isn’t just a handful of Parisian startup bros googling between espresso shots. While France still trails Switzerland and Germany in per-capita intensity, it comfortably outpaces Southern European slackers in Italy and Spain. The Brits clocked in at a mere 14th.

💸 Weekly Funding Recap: February 27

📇 Company: Verley
🏷️ Sectors: FoodTech, AgriTech, DeepTech, BioTech
🔍 Description: Verley is a French food and nutrition ingredient company developing high-purity, functionalised whey proteins through precision fermentation. Founded in 2022, the company focuses on producing beta-lactoglobulin (BLG) designed to meet industrial performance standards across high-protein applications such as yoghurts and protein shots. By combining nutritional performance, industrial scalability, and sustainability, Verley aims to support food and beverage manufacturers in developing next-generation high-protein products while significantly reducing natural resource usage compared to conventional dairy production.
💻 Website: Verley
📍 HQ City: Lyon
🧗 Round: Series A
💰 Amount Raised: €32M
🏦 Investors: Alven, Blast, Bpifrance, Sofinnova, Sparkfood, Captech, Founders Future
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Stéphane Mac Millan, Hélène Briand
🗞️ News: Verley has secured an oversubscribed €32M Series A round four years after inception, positioning the company toward the upper end of European precision fermentation and functional protein ingredient financings in 2025/2026. The round will fund U.S. market entry, commercial deployment, early customer scale-up, expanded production capacity, and continued R&D to enhance performance, efficiency, and sustainability. Verley’s FermWhey portfolio leverages precision fermentation to deliver high-purity whey proteins with advanced solubility, emulsification, gelling properties, and optimised nutritional profiles. As global protein demand continues to grow—driven by mainstream high-protein consumption trends, demographic shifts, and the rapid expansion of GLP-1 treatments—Verley aims to alleviate pressure on the dairy industry by providing scalable, lower-impact alternatives integrated into existing food value chains. | EU Startups, Maddyness

📇 Company: Meelo
🏷️ Sectors: FinTech, AI & Machine Learning, Cybersecurity
🔍 Description: Meelo is a French fintech SaaS company specialising in digital onboarding security, fraud prevention, and risk intelligence. Founded in 2017, the company combines Open Banking, Open Data, and artificial intelligence technologies to detect identity, documentary, and financial fraud, assess solvency, and automate risk evaluation. Meelo’s platform aims to reduce fraud risk by 10 and associated costs by 4, while delivering transparent, explainable decisions for financial institutions. Certified B-Corp and structured as a mission-driven company, Meelo positions itself as a European leader in ethical AI-driven “risk & trust digital.”
💻 Website: Meelo
📍 HQ City: France
🧗 Round: Series B
💰 Amount Raised: €14M
🏦 Investors: ISALT
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Laurent Kocinski
🗞️ News: ISALT, through its Fonds Stratégique des Transitions (FST), has taken a minority stake in Meelo with a €14M ticket and additional reinvestment capacity for future external growth operations. The investment will support team expansion across France and Europe, accelerated R&D—particularly in generative AI—and international development. Meelo serves more than 60 clients, including BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, and Crédit Mutuel, and reports strong growth and profitability. Positioned in a market facing increasing identity and financial fraud risks, Meelo enables credit institutions, insurers, and lenders to automate real-time predictive risk analysis while maintaining smooth customer journeys. The deal marks the eighth investment of FST, an Article 8 SFDR-classified fund backed by Caisse des Dépôts and InvestEU, focused on supporting innovative French SMEs driving technological and societal transitions. | Finyear

📇 Company: hummingbirds
🏷️ Sectors: CleanTech, AgriTech
🔍 Description: hummingbirds is a French nature-based solutions (NbS) project developer founded in 2022. The company finances and scales high-integrity carbon projects focused on afforestation, reforestation, mangrove restoration, REDD+, and regenerative initiatives. Operating through six local offices across Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Australia, hummingbirds develops community-driven conservation and restoration projects designed to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and local livelihood improvement.
💻 Website: hummingbirds
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €5M
🏦 Investors: Swedfund, Proparco, British International Investment
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Anaïs Bach, Damien Ricordeau
🗞️ News: hummingbirds has secured €50M in commitments from three major European Development Finance Institutions to scale its portfolio of high-integrity Nature-based Solutions projects. The platform aims to sequester 25 million tons of CO₂e, sustainably manage 200,000 hectares, protect habitats for 100 endangered species, and improve livelihoods for 250,000 people, with a strong focus on gender inclusion. The initiative benefits from the EDFI Carbon Sinks guarantee, backed by the European Union under the EFSD+ programme, reinforcing its credibility in voluntary and compliance carbon markets. This funding positions hummingbirds as a leading European player in high-quality carbon project development, targeting scalable, verifiable, and community-driven climate impact solutions. | ESG Today

📇 Company: Alpa
🏷️ Sectors: FinTech, SaaS & Enterprise, FoodTech
🔍 Description: Alpa is a London-based FinTech platform built for the hospitality industry, offering restaurant groups real-time visibility into margins, costs, cash flow, and profitability. Founded in 2026, the company positions itself as the operational financial layer that complements traditional accounting software. By integrating directly with POS systems, banking infrastructure, and suppliers, Alpa structures fragmented financial data into live, operator-grade P&Ls, enabling hospitality businesses to make daily, data-driven decisions rather than relying on month-end reporting.
💻 Website: Alpa
📍 HQ City: London
🧗 Round: Pre-Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €2.9M
🏦 Investors: Daphni, True Capital, 2100 Ventures, Firedrop, Oprtrs Club, Kima Ventures, Sonorcap, Business Angels, Alexandre Yazdi, Jerome Tafani
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Anton Soulier, Jean-François Moy
🗞️ News: Alpa has raised €2.9M in pre-Seed funding to accelerate product and engineering development. The capital will be used to deepen integrations with POS systems, banks, and suppliers, and to invest in automation, AI-driven data classification, and scalable financial infrastructure. Targeting Europe’s 2 million hospitality businesses, Alpa addresses a structural gap in financial visibility, where many operators only understand profitability weeks after month-end. By delivering real-time operational P&Ls without replacing existing accounting tools, Alpa aims to become the financial operating system for the hospitality industry. The round signals continued investor appetite for hospitality-focused financial infrastructure across Europe following multiple large 2025–2026 HospitalityTech financings. | EU Startups

📇 Company: THE 8 IMPACT
🏷️ Sectors: ClimateTech, E-commerce & Retail
🔍 Description: THE 8 IMPACT is a French startup industrialising high-performance regenerated materials for sneaker soles, made from end-of-life shoes and tennis balls. Founded by Marie Soudré-Richard and Hélène Guerret, the company has developed a patented mechanical recycling process—without water or chemical solvents—capable of transforming post-consumer waste into stable, homogeneous materials that meet the performance standards of major footwear brands. Combined with proprietary automatic formulation software, the technology ensures industrial-grade quality and reduces carbon footprint by up to 50% compared to virgin materials.
💻 Website: THE 8 IMPACT
📍 HQ City: Saint-Rémy
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €2M
🏦 Investors: Collateral Good, Bpifrance, Makesense
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Marie Soudré-Richard, Hélène Guerret
🗞️ News: THE 8 IMPACT has raised €2M to accelerate the industrialisation of regenerated materials as a competitive alternative to virgin inputs in footwear manufacturing. Already deployed with Veja, the solution will be industrialised from 2026 by Decathlon and two major running and trail brands, validating its economic and operational viability. The funding will support increased production capacity and expansion across Europe and the Americas. Positioned in the footwear market amid mounting regulatory and environmental pressure, THE 8 IMPACT aims to build a scalable circular value chain and make recycled materials a credible, low-carbon standard for sneaker manufacturing. | Bpifrance

📇 Company: Opus Aerospace
🏷️ Sectors: SpaceTech & Aerospace, DefenseTech, DeepTech
🔍 Description: Opus Aerospace is a French deeptech startup developing reusable suborbital sounding rockets for civil and military applications. Founded in 2020, the company targets the strategic “suborbital gap” — too high for aircraft and too low for satellites — with its 5-meter rocket Mésange, powered by a proprietary 3D-printed engine (Torgos) using a hydrogen peroxide/propane mix designed to reduce environmental impact while reaching speeds up to Mach 5. Opus aims to build a sovereign European suborbital launch platform addressing both defense simulations and scientific flight testing.
💻 Website: Opus Aerospace
📍 HQ City: Brétigny-sur-Orge
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €1.2M
🏦 Investors: Sowefund, Bpifrance, BADGE, Itera Invest, Defense Angels, FIVES Group
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Safouane Benamer, Clara Salvetti
🗞️ News: Opus Aerospace has opened its capital to the public via a Sowefund campaign as part of a €1.2M round, acting as a bridge toward a planned ~€5M pre-Series A expected at the end of 2026. The funding will be allocated 40% to R&D, 25% to commercial operations, 25% to industrial investments, and 10% to operational needs. The company plans a first suborbital launch from Kourou (French Guiana) under a CNES contract by mid-2026, followed by initial commercial missions between 2026 and 2027, including defense simulations and international research flights. Positioned at the intersection of sovereignty, defense, and scientific research, Opus Aerospace aims to reduce Europe’s reliance on non-European suborbital systems, which currently account for 83% of small launchers and aerial target systems used in the region. | Maddyness

📇 Company: OOrion
🏷️ Sectors: AI & Machine Learning, E-commerce & Retail, TravelTech
🔍 Description: OOrion is a Lyon-based startup developing a free AI-powered navigation and product recognition app for visually impaired users. Founded in 2022 by Stéphanie Robieux and Thomas Brisson after graduating from Centrale Lyon, the solution uses smartphone cameras and AI to identify products and guide users in physical spaces such as supermarkets and hotels. Available in 32 languages across 90 countries, OOrion is currently the most widely adopted assistive navigation solution for visually impaired people in Europe.
💻 Website: OOrion
📍 HQ City: Lyon
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €1M
🏦 Investors: Business Angels, Bartimeus Fund
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Stéphanie Robieux, Thomas Brisson
🗞️ News: OOrion has raised a “modest” €1M round combining equity from business angels and Dutch impact fund Bartimaeus with bank loans, allowing the company to strengthen its technical team while maintaining strategic control. The startup met Bartimaeus during a regional delegation to CES in Las Vegas in 2024 and continued to build the relationship before closing the round. OOrion has already reached 20,000 visually impaired users, primarily in France. In retail, 11 Carrefour hypermarkets have deployed the app, with a larger-scale pilot underway with Intermarché. The company also serves hospitality clients, including Accor, Pullman, and MGallery hotels, and recently partnered with the Lyon-based chefs association Les Toques Blanches. OOrion has joined two major incubation programs: France Tourisme Tech and a Meta–SNCF AI open-source acceleration program at Station F involving Hugging Face. While currently focused on software, the company is exploring future integration with connected glasses to expand its assistive capabilities. | Les Echos

📇 Company: Desk
🏷️ Sectors: PropTech, SaaS & Enterprise, AI & Machine Learning
🔍 Description: Desk is a French SaaS platform specialising in the automation of management and commercialization for shared workspaces. Founded in 2021, the company provides coworking operators and flexible space managers with an all-in-one operating system to automate bookings, access control (via ephemeral keys or codes), billing, and customer management. Positioned as a digital infrastructure layer for shared spaces, Desk aims to replace manual processes still largely managed via phone and spreadsheets, reducing operating costs and ultimately lowering rents for clients.
💻 Website: Desk
📍 HQ City: Montpellier
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €1M
🏦 Investors: Business Angels, Bpifrance, France 2030
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Julian Domercq, Pierre-Louis Schnitzler
🗞️ News: Desk has raised €1M to accelerate its expansion from 200 equipped sites in France to a target of 1,000 by 2027. The round includes €600k in equity and €400k in public-backed loans. The funding will support four hires (two tech profiles focused on AI features and two commercial roles), international expansion into Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and deeper AI integration. Desk’s solution is already used by networks such as Come’N’Work and Today Coworking, as well as independent rural and peri-urban spaces, wellness-focused coworking hubs, and music studios. The company is investing in advanced AI-driven data analysis to optimise pricing, demand forecasting, and automated prospecting, with a longer-term vision of becoming the central data connector between shared spaces and AI agents, chatbots, and third-party software interfaces. | Infonet

📇 Company: Formel AI
🏷️ Sectors: AI & Machine Learning
🔍 Description: Formel AI is an AI startup building production-grade large language models enhanced with formal verification to eliminate reasoning hallucinations. The company combines formal methods and LLM architectures to ensure logical consistency and mathematical correctness in AI-generated outputs, aiming to deliver 100% logically consistent LLMs for enterprise and mission-critical applications.
💻 Website: Formel AI
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Pre-Seed
💰 Amount Raised: Undisclosed
🏦 Investors: Business Angels
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Antoine Mazarguil
🗞️ News: Formel AI has closed an oversubscribed angel round backed by more than 30 prominent operators, AI founders, and researchers from across the European tech ecosystem. The funding will support hiring across AI engineering and formal methods, as well as strategy and operations, as the company advances its breakthrough approach combining formal verification with large language models. By addressing reasoning hallucinations at the logical layer, Formel AI aims to unlock production-ready, verifiably consistent AI systems for high-stakes use cases. | LinkedIn

📇 Company: fxhash
🏷️ Sectors: Web3
🔍 Description: fxhash is a generative art platform and NFT marketplace originally built on Tezos, now expanding to Ethereum and Base. The platform enables artists to mint and monetize on-chain generative artworks and is evolving into a broader “art economy” powered by its $FXH token and protocol. Recent developments include art coins, bonding curves, liquidity mechanisms, and new monetization primitives designed to blend digital art with DeFi infrastructure.
💻 Website: fxhash
📍 HQ City: Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille
🧗 Round: Series A
💰 Amount Raised: Undisclosed
🏦 Investors: Coinbase Ventures, Re7 Capital, Social Graph VC, MitonC
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Baptiste Crespy
🗞️ News: fxhash has announced a new funding round to support the expansion of its generative art ecosystem on Ethereum and Base. While the exact amount was not disclosed, the round follows its $5M Seed in August 2023, led by 1kx. The participation of Coinbase Ventures signals strong alignment with Base’s ecosystem and reinforces institutional confidence in fxhash’s multi-chain evolution. The funding will accelerate development of advanced generative tools, protocol features tied to the $FXH token, and ecosystem growth initiatives. With $FXH already listed on Coinbase and Base emerging as a low-fee hub for NFTs and experimental Web3 projects, this round strengthens fxhash’s ambition to build durable infrastructure for on-chain creativity, tokenized art economies, and community-driven digital ownership models. | Twitter

📇 Company: Mecaware
🏷️ Sectors: CleanTech, DeepTech
🔍 Description: Mecaware is a French industrial cleantech startup specialising in the recycling of strategic metals from end-of-life batteries and battery manufacturing scrap. Founded in January 2021, the company has developed a closed-loop, eco²-efficient process that produces lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper in carbonate or hydroxide form, without generating harmful effluents and with limited external energy input. Its compact, replicable industrial model is designed to be deployed near waste sources, supporting European battery manufacturers and reducing dependence on imports from extra-European sources.
💻 Website: Mecaware
📍 HQ City: Béthune
🧗 Round: Public Grant + Equity Option (EIC Accelerator)
💰 Amount Raised: €2.5M grant
🏦 Investors: European Innovation Council
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Arnaud Villers d’Arbouet
🗞️ News: Mecaware has been selected as a laureate of the highly selective EIC Accelerator programme, with only 4% of applicants accepted. The program provides a €2.5M grant and access to potential equity financing of up to €10M to support industrial scale-up. This recognition strengthens Mecaware’s financial base as it advances its pilot plant in Béthune, scheduled for commissioning in late 2026, with a target capacity of over 8,000 tonnes of strategic metals per year by 2029 and around 100 direct jobs. The company is concurrently raising €20M to accelerate industrial deployment. Positioned as a strategic player in Europe’s battery value chain, Mecaware aims to reduce the continent’s 96% dependence on imported critical metals while building a sovereign, circular supply chain for lithium-ion battery materials.

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