👋 Inside this week's edition:
👀 Can Europe build a social network without the toxicity, addictive algorithms, and ad-driven model of Big Tech? Epsilon thinks so. FTJ spoke to co-founder Thomas Rocafull about his vision for a quieter, sovereign, and responsible alternative. Check out the interview here.
Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand
Introducing: France AI Radar. Discover the next generation of French AI startups before the market.
We detect AI startups across France at their earliest signal: when they are incorporated, still in stealth, or just beginning to leave a public trace. Structured intelligence built from administrative filings, founder activity, and ecosystem signals, designed for VCs, corporate strategists, and LPs.
Tech Talk
🇫🇷 🎤 From “changing the world” to having the culot to take risks. The 11th edition of Bpifrance's flagship event BIG took place at Bercy arena in Paris yesterday. The event has mirrored the evolution of French entrepreneurship since its 2015 launch, growing from 15,000 participants to roughly 80,000 registrations this year. Over 11 editions, themes have moved from transformation and conquest to AI, truth, and, this year, audacity, or Culot, as we like to say in French. Closing yesterday's event, Macron delivered his own greatest-hits reel: 2.5M+ jobs created, more startups, more data centers and a decarbonized energy model. His message? France hasn’t won every battle, but entrepreneurs need less defeatism and more risk-taking, investment and modernization. With a presidential election less than eight months away, his defense of a decade of economic reforms also reminded everyone that France’s next chapter will depend on its ability to keep innovating and competing. | Maddyness
⚛️🪖 The sovereignty, she giveth. And the sovereignty, she taketh away. France’s armed forces pushed Pasqal out of its €500 million defense-computing program as the company's center of gravity shifted toward the U.S. following its recent IPO. Pasqal simply claims that it chose to focus on civilian quantum applications. But Les Échos reports that the company had become too American for France's military. "This succession of events has made the situation untenable, the center of gravity has drifted across the Atlantic," a source told Les Échos. An American executive took the helm, Pasqal set up its U.S. headquarters in Illinois, and a Nasdaq listing followed. The company raised $360 million and says losing its defense work won’t hurt its finances, though the military procurement agency accounted for about a third of its 2025 revenue. Alice & Bob, Quandela, Quobly and C12 remain in the race. | Les Échos, BFMTV, Pasqal
⚛️💻 Meanwhile, in other quantum news...Quobly is adding access to CEA-Leti’s FAMES pilot line to its silicon-quantum push, giving the Grenoble startup new tools to test chip processes for future processors alongside its existing partnership with STMicroelectronics. Launched in January, FAMES is a shared European facility that brings semiconductor ideas closer to industrial production. ST’s 300 mm factories remain Quobly’s route for manufacturing its current chip designs. The move follows Quobly’s September announcement that it had demonstrated qubit readout and one- and two-qubit gates together on a chip made using ST’s commercial process, though detailed performance data are still to come. Fresh from a €115 million June funding round, the company is targeting cloud access to its first system, Alloy Pioneer, by the end of 2026, and one million qubits by 2032. | VIPress, Quobly
👓🛒 After eight years building Lynx into a rare European challenger in mixed reality, founder Stan Larroque says the company’s IP, assets and most of its team have been acquired by eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica. The deal follows the March liquidation of Lynx’s parent company after a failed restructuring. The company raised only about $6 million, and its long-promised R2 headset never reached market. So while the technology and team live on, Lynx as an independent headset maker appears to be history, and the R2’s future looks doubtful. Larroque, meanwhile, is heading to Parrot for a key leadership role alongside founder Henri Seydoux. He says the original R1 headset is now at the Computer History Museum: a place in tech history, even if the sequel never got made. | Numerama, Parrot, LinkedIn
🇫🇷 ☁️ France is putting €47M behind trusted cloud and AI infrastructure. Cloud Temple, Thales, Bull, Vates and the CEA are joining forces to develop services for sensitive data, with €20M in support from France 2030. The consortium aims to strengthen French providers’ position against US cloud giants by combining expertise in cybersecurity, AI hardware, open-source virtualization and research. The consortium plans around 80 products by the end of 2028, with 15 already launched. The challenge? Turning France’s technological expertise into competitive services at scale. | L’Usine Digitale
🌊💸 Too old for VC, too young for growth? IronWave is going after France’s funding gap. Former Wendel investors Victoire Laurenty and Antoine Izsak have raised €105M for a new fund targeting startups generating €3–10M in revenue. Wendel is putting up half the first close and taking a 30% stake in the manager. The pair previously ran Wendel’s €70M growth fund, backing Preligens, Aqemia and YesWeHack. | Les Echos
🇫🇷 🧾 French digital receipt startup Billiv has entered receivership, four years after raising €1.3M. Its platform combined paperless receipts with customer loyalty and targeted marketing tools, integrated directly into payment terminals. A court-appointed process is now seeking a buyer for the business after the company stopped making payments in July. | Pappers
🗽🔥 And finally, we come to those hardy band of Frenchmen who have been toiling away in the arid plains of Texas to create the ultimate monument to hero worship. Paris-based Atelier Missor says it finished a 50-foot bronze Prometheus, cast near Paris, shipped it across the Atlantic, and assembled it in Texas in 100 days as a gift originally intended for Elon Musk’s Starbase. The studio reportedly put up about $1 million of its own money. Alas, it is not on SpaceX's company town land, and it's unclear whether they got any $$$ from Elmo himself, aka the world's richest man. It’s bronze rather than titanium, and it stands on private land beside a Texas road about 10 miles from Starbase. It is a spectacular monument to a man who has been charged with defrauding investors, fathering 14 children with 4 women, and using the platform FKA as Twitter to amplify hateful conspiracy theories and far-right memes. But then, as Mother Jones (which called them "a group of men dressed like extras from Les Misérables") noted, Missor Movahed Ghaleh Nouri, a conservative YouTuber (natch) and founder of Atelier Missor, has been hot mad at the Black Lives Matter movement for tearing down statues of white men. The New Republic described them: "They dress like it’s the Industrial Revolution, but they’re very online denizens of the anti-woke manosphere. And they want to build a new Statue of Liberty for the United States—a male one, of course." Missor also made an 11-foot bronze George Washington for Trump’s Freedom 250 celebrations. “Rebuild Rome” is the studio’s mantra, which, you know, has certain connotations with the right crowd. | Mother Jones, The New Republic
Sovereign Social Network Epsilon Wants To Succeed by Asking You to Scroll Less
French platform Epsilon is betting people want a calmer feed, stronger moderation, and more choice. Its founders say 5,000 people signed up in its first four days. We spoke to Co-Founder Thomas Rocafull about this vision for a quieter, sovereign, and responsible alternative.
💸 Top Funding Deals 💸
📇 Company: Vates
🏷️ Sectors: Enterprise Software, Cloud Infrastructure, Open Source, Virtualization, Cybersecurity, Digital Sovereignty
🔍 Description: Develops open-source enterprise virtualization software, including XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra, offering organizations an alternative to VMware for managing virtual machines, infrastructure, backups, and data-center operations.
💻 Website: https://vates.tech/
📍 HQ City: Grenoble
🧗 Round: Growth Equity
💰 Amount Raised: €30 million
🏦 Investors: IRIS, Bpifrance
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Olivier Lambert, Nithida Vialle, Julien Fontanet
🗞️ News: October 6, 2026. After more than a decade of self-funded growth, Vates raised its first €30M external investment to accelerate international expansion and strengthen its open-source virtualization platform. The financing comes as Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and subsequent licensing changes have prompted enterprises to reconsider their infrastructure providers. Vates reports more than 1,000 customers in about 100 countries, with 90% of revenue outside France and nearly half of its business from North America. The company grew more than 65% in 2025 and plans to invest in storage, security, automation, and large-scale virtualization management. Its founders retain majority control, and its principal software products will remain open source. | Vates, Tech.eu
📇 Company: Rivercell
🏷️ Sectors: AI, Biotechnology, TechBio, Drug Discovery, Generative Biology
🔍 Description: Develops proprietary biological-data infrastructure and AI models that predict how human cells respond to drugs and genetic modifications. Its platform combines automated laboratory experiments, multimodal single-cell data, and AI world models to accelerate drug discovery.
💻 Website: https://www.rivercell.ai
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €22 million
🏦 Investors: HV, HCVC, Alven, Bpifrance, Business Angels
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Yann Fleureau (co-founder and CEO), formerly co-founder and CEO of Cardiologs; Eric Durand (co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer), formerly Chief Data Science Officer at Owkin and co-founder of Bioptimus.
🗞️ News: October 7, 2026. Rivercell emerged from stealth with a $25M seed round led by HV to build an AI world model capable of predicting how human cells respond to treatments. Started by Fleureau in summer 2025, with Durand joining as co-founder in 2026, the company will use the financing to expand its Paris laboratory, scale its proprietary biological-data generation platform and launch its AI Virtual Cell program. The startup aims to create training data that existing laboratory technologies cannot generate at sufficient scale, potentially reducing the number of physical experiments required during drug development. | AFP, Rivercell, EU-Startups
📇 Company: Verso
🏷️ Sectors: Artificial Intelligence, SaaS, Market Research, Consumer Intelligence, Marketing Technology, AI Agents
🔍 Description: AI-powered consumer research platform that automates study design, participant recruitment, video and voice interviews, and qualitative analysis. Verso uses adaptive AI interviewers to collect consumer feedback and builds continuously updated consumer profiles and searchable knowledge bases for product, marketing, and strategy teams.
💻 Website: https://www.askverso.ai
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: $6 million
🏦 Investors: Angular Ventures, 100in, Kima Ventures, Olympe Capital, Sharpstone Capital, Business Angels, Roxanne Varza, Hexa
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Lydia Bellahouel, Camille Epitalon
🗞️ News: October 8, 2026. Paris-based Verso raised $6M in seed funding led by Angular Ventures to expand its AI-powered consumer intelligence platform internationally, particularly into the United States. The company says its technology delivers consumer insights 10 times faster and at one-quarter the cost of traditional research agencies, while reaching approximately 15 times as many respondents. More than 30 companies, including Ferrero, Orange and Michelin, already use the platform. The financing will support integrating additional data sources, including quantitative research and social listening; developing interfaces that let AI agents access consumer intelligence; and recruiting across engineering and commercial functions. Rather than delivering isolated market research reports, Verso aims to build persistent consumer knowledge bases that companies can query continuously as they develop products and marketing strategies. | Hexa, Tech.eu, FrenchWeb
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