👋 Inside this week's edition:
👀 Nice deeptech Cosma spent its early years teaching autonomous drones to see underwater. Over the past year, it has focused on making that technology work for customers and discovering that they want it for more than biodiversity. Now the French deeptech is scaling from prototype to global ambition. Dive into the story here.
Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand
A founder-only breakfast in Paris: Ahead of Vanta's Trust Tour Paris, we're hosting a small-room session for founders: Growth Breakfast Club: Build the Product, Buy the Trust, September 15, 9:30–11:30 AM, Le Grand Hôtel Cayré.
Christina Cacioppo, Co-Founder & CEO of Vanta, and Gabriel Hubert, Co-Founder & CEO of Dust, sit down to talk about why the best-scaling teams are ruthless about what they build in-house and just as deliberate about what they buy.
Expect real talk on:
- Why build vs. buy is a habit, not a one-time call
- How Dust scales multiplayer AI without losing team alignment
- Why compliance is one of the clearest buy-not-build decisions
Tech Talk
📡 🇪🇺 Europe gathered in Paris this week to prove it was serious about space sovereignty. Speaking at the two-day International Space Summit in Paris Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron called for "shared governance" of space in a speech urging European nations to work together to build up their joint sovereign space capabilities. The summit highlighted how much work remains. Commercial deals worth billions were signed, but there were no major new public funding commitments despite ESA chief Josef Aschbacher calling for a € 1bn-a-year investment for the next decade and European industry demanding at least €60bn from the EU’s next budget. With SpaceX pulling out and several major European leaders absent under pressure from the U.S. government, Europe's desire to become a bigger, independent space power seemed all the more urgent. It just hasn’t decided how much it’s willing to spend to get there.| Politico, France 24
👾🌌 Just before the big Space Hoedown, Franco-German scaleup The Exploration Company lit the fuse by announcing it has raised $450 million in Series C funding. That brings its total funding to around $680 million. Bessemer and Atomico co-led the round alongside the EU’s Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, with backing from investors including Balderton, Plural and Cherry. Founded in 2021 by former Airbus executive Hélène Huby, the company is developing reusable capsules to ferry cargo to and from space stations in low-Earth orbit. Huby aims to build from Europe while drawing on talent, customers and partners worldwide. The deal marks the Scaleup Europe Fund’s fourth investment, joining a portfolio that already includes Iceye, Lovable and Mistral. | Sifted
🚀 🇪🇺 While policy was the main course at the summit, deals were served up relentlessly as appetizers to reinforce the image of a space ecosystem with momentum...To wit, Ariane 6 landed its biggest commercial haul since entering service, around 10 launches in two days, while Thales Alenia Space has secured a €500m tranche to equip 330 satellites for Europe’s IRIS² secure-connectivity constellation. After years of worrying about Europe’s dependence on SpaceX, the deals are an attempt (enfin!) to build its own space infrastructure. | Reuters, Ariane, Thales
🛰️ 🇫🇷 Meanwhile...France's Loft Orbital announced a $1 billion deal with Abu Dhabi’s Marlan Space to build a constellation of 50 AI-equipped satellites, unveiled at the space summit. With Mistral supplying the AI and Nvidia the hardware, the satellites will process observations onboard to help detect wildfires, missile launches and threats to energy infrastructure. The partners’ Orbitworks joint venture will manufacture the satellites, with the first launch scheduled for October and MaiaSpace selected as a preferred partner for future launches. It’s a revealing snapshot of modern tech sovereignty: a French-led project combining French AI, American chips and Emirati capital.| Le Monde, Maddyness, Sifted
And now, back on Planet Earth:
🤖🕵️ Mistral’s robotics chief Olivier Duchenne is seeking €200 million in seed funding for a new startup called Ora, targeting a €1 billion post-money valuation, according to Sifted. The former Meta researcher’s pitch tackles a stubborn robotics bottleneck: finding enough real-world training data to teach machines useful physical tasks. Ora reportedly plans to build a “data factory” using human teleoperators, then feed data from robot deployments into its own models to understand surroundings, interpret instructions, and take action. The business would offer robots as a service, with a potential collaboration involving French computer vision scaleup XXII. The plans remain preliminary: Mistral told Sifted it had no knowledge of the startup’s creation, and Duchenne did not respond to requests for comment. | Sifted
🧮👎 France received a grim report card: its 15-year-olds recorded their lowest-ever PISA scores in maths, reading and science. Naturally, this caused a MAJOR freakout across a land that prides itself on being the top of the top when it comes to math and stuff and thingies. Math scores fell 16 points, and reading scores dropped 18 points from 2022, although France remains around the OECD average as other countries experience similar declines. Some 36% of French students now struggle with math, while just 5% rank among the highest performers, down from 15% in 2003. Zut alors, baby! Researchers suggest lingering pandemic effects, heavy screen use, and declining parental engagement may contribute, alongside persistent problems with classroom disruption and staffing. For a country betting heavily on AI and deeptech, the shrinking share of strong maths performers raises concerns about the next generation of technical talent. | Le Monde
🚧 🇪🇺 Europe has a new plan to stop its best inventions from becoming someone else’s businesses. The European Commission’s proposed Innovation Act tackles one of the continent’s oldest tech problems: great research, weak commercialization. The plan would make IP easier to value and trade, open up cross-border public R&D procurement and create regulatory sandboxes. The Commission says it could unlock €10bn+ in annual financing. Now Brussels is trying to tackle the other half of the problem: making it easier for those companies to scale.| European Commission
🇪🇺 ⚖️ Europe is trying to build a single rulebook for startups. Founders are already warning Brussels not to water it down. The proposed EU Inc. status would let companies incorporate online in 48 hours, without minimum capital, while harmonizing key rules across Europe. But as negotiations accelerate ahead of a year-end deadline, around 40 entrepreneurs and investors — including Mistral AI’s Arthur Mensch and Station F’s Roxanne Varza - are warning that an “EU Inc. lite” would be doomed to fail. Their fear: instead of replacing 27 national systems with a genuinely European framework, Brussels will simply bolt another layer onto them.| Les Echos
🧩 🇫🇷 French software is getting a lot bigger. Cegid and payroll specialist Silae plan to merge into a European software group valued at more than €10bn, creating a heavyweight spanning business management, accounting and HR. Both are backed by the global American investment firm, Silver Lake, which will retain control of the combined company. It’s less glamorous than a new unicorn, but it may be a more European way to build one: consolidation, instead of endless rounds of venture capital.| Reuters
📈 🇫🇷 French Tech is growing up...but it still can’t quite scale. A new France Digitale/EY barometer counts nearly 18,000 startups and 530,000 direct jobs, with €4.58bn raised in the first half of 2026. But the good news comes with a catch: France still lags the UK and Germany in growth, struggles to help startups reach international scale, and lacks enough big exits to recycle capital into the next generation. The ecosystem is bigger. Is it actually getting stronger? .| Usine Nouvelle, EY
Cosma: From Seabed Mapping to Underwater Intelligence
A lot can change for a deeptech startup in a year.
In June 2025, French startup Cosma raised €2.5 million to commercialize a technology that makes the seabed visible at unprecedented resolution. Its initial pitch focused largely on marine biodiversity: mapping ecosystems, identifying species, and helping developers avoid sensitive habitats.
Fifteen months later, Cosma has raised a further €2.05 million, taking total funding to more than €7 million when equity, debt and public funding are included. Biodiversity remains part of the company’s mission, but the technology has matured, and its commercial center of gravity has shifted. Cosma is now being pulled towards defense, energy and critical infrastructure. These are markets where knowing exactly what is happening on the seabed can be operationally critical.
“We’re moving from development to deployment,” CEO Frédéric Mittaine said.
That transition has meant a year of debugging, refining hardware, developing new capabilities, and increasingly putting the technology in customers' hands.
💸 Top Funding Deals 💸
📇 Company: Implicity
🏷️ Sectors: HealthTech, MedTech, AI
🔍 Description: Developer of a manufacturer-neutral platform that centralizes data from connected cardiac devices and helps care teams prioritize remote-monitoring alerts, workflows, and billing.
💻 Website: https://implicity.com/
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Growth equity
💰 Amount Raised: €35M
🏦 Investors: IRIS, Five Arrows
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Arnaud Rosier, David Perlmutter
🗞️ News: Implicity will use the funding to expand in the United States and develop predictive algorithms for cardiac care. The company says its platform is deployed in more than 250 medical centers across France, Germany, and the U.S., monitoring over 120,000 patients. | FrenchWeb, EU Startups
📇 Company: Arlequin AI
🏷️ Sectors: AI, DefenseTech
🔍 Description: Developer of topological neural-network models and data-analysis software designed to uncover complex relationships across fragmented datasets for government and enterprise users.
💻 Website: https://arlq.ai/
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Series A
💰 Amount Raised: €28M
🏦 Investors: Redalpine, OTB Ventures, Bpifrance’s Fonds Innovation Défense, Vsquared Ventures, 10x Founders, Xavier Niel
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Hugo Micheron, Antoine Jardin
🗞️ News: Arlequin AI will use the funding to expand its R&D team, train proprietary topological AI models, and support commercial deployments. The company, which positions itself as a European sovereign alternative to Palantir, has also opened offices in London and Berlin and plans a Silicon Valley research lab. | FrenchWeb
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