👋 Inside this week's edition:

👀 Can physics transform cancer treatment and also generate $6 billion in annual sales? Nanobiotix CEO Laurent Lévy believes so. In an exclusive interview, he explains why the company’s physics-based approach could underpin a new class of medicines, while its lead therapy, partnered with Johnson & Johnson, could soon generate $6 billion in annual sales. Read all about it here.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

Tech Talk

🚀💸 The Exploration Company is in advanced talks to raise roughly $350 million in a round co-led by Atomico and Bessemer Venture Partners, valuing the Franco-German space startup at around $2 billion. Founded by former Airbus executive Hélène Huby, the company is developing reusable capsules to carry cargo (and eventually humans) to space stations and the Moon. EQT’s new €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund could also join the round, although negotiations are ongoing and nothing has been signed. The fundraising comes as Europe scrambles to build sovereign space champions after another reminder that Elon Musk has a rather substantial head start. TEC, meanwhile, is hedging its geopolitical bets with a new US entity and laboratory in Houston. | Financial Times, Sifted

🇫🇷✈️ AB Tasty’s code is heading east. Six months after merging with Indian rival VWO, the French A/B testing pioneer is preparing to cut 78 jobs in France, including its entire engineering team, as R&D is consolidated in India around a single platform. The company says it’s about eliminating duplication and staying competitive in the AI era, while unions argue the move was already planned before the merger. France will keep the customer-facing teams - but the technology that made AB Tasty one of the country’s SaaS success stories will now largely be built elsewhere. Another reminder that in global software, scale often comes with a new postcode. | Les Echos, Maddyness

🎙️💰 Guillaume Pley’s Legend is now a €72m media company. Belgian family office FG Bros has acquired a roughly 25% stake in the interview platform through a secondary sale valuing the business at €72 million. Founded just three years ago, Legend reportedly generates around €10m in annual revenue and €3.8m in net profit, with a business model spanning YouTube advertising, sponsorships and premium branded interviews. The valuation also highlights a key challenge for creator-led businesses: how much of the company’s value is attributable to the brand, and how much to Guillaume Pley himself? | Maddyness

👮 The Élysée summoned representatives from TikTok, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Roblox and other major platforms to explain how they plan to enforce France’s forthcoming social-media ban for children under 15. The companies protested that the September 1 deadline is wildly unrealistic, apparently discovering that governments can also ship policies before the product is ready. Paris is threatening to refer non-compliant platforms to the European Commission, raising the prospect of yet another Brussels showdown over Big Tech. Meanwhile, Starlink reportedly offered to assist French authorities during the wildfires, an overture that was declined. | Politico

🦄 💸 France’s most active startup backers aren’t VCs anymore. Dealroom’s H1 rankings show Bpifrance and Kima Ventures still leading the pack, but only **one traditional VC fund—Daphni—**makes the top six. Instead, operators like Drysdale, creator funds such as Blast, and accelerator Y Combinator are increasingly shaping France’s earliest funding rounds. The message? Founders are getting their first cheques from a much broader cast of investors than just VC firms. | Dealroom

💰💪 ...Speaking of Kima...The Family Office released a 2026 H1 update disclosing that it had backed 97 startups in the first 6 months of 2026, deploying more than €10 million at an average of €130,000 per deal. AI, deeptech and health led the portfolio with 14, 14 and 11 investments respectively, while consumer startups also accounted for 11 deals. Seventy percent of the companies were based in France or elsewhere in Europe, with the remaining 30% in the US, including 11 Y Combinator startups. Kima also backed 10 companies from Station F’s F/ai program and brought more than 500 founders together through its events. | LinkedIn

🤑👼...Speaking of Angels...A new ranking placed famed Business Angel Frenchie Fabrice Grinda at No. 2 on a global list, sandwiched between a couple of relative unknown up-and-comers. His website notes that he's backed 1,321 startups. So far. | LinkedIn

🛠️📈 Hexa taps Virtuo co-founder to revive stalled SaaS startups. After nearly a decade building car rental startup Virtuo, Thibault Chassagne has joined Hexa Scale as a Partner. The program invests €5m-€20m in B2B SaaS companies that have hit a growth ceiling, pairing capital with hands-on operational support and an AI-first transformation strategy. Chassagne joins a growing bench of former founders at Hexa, alongside entrepreneurs from Selency, Luko and Cowboy, as the startup studio expands beyond company creation into company reinvention. | Maddyness

♻️🏢 Paris-based real estate sustainability platform Deepki has acquired London startup Camion, adding agentic AI tools for planning electrification investments to its growing data empire. Camion’s technology combines demand forecasts, tariffs, and grid data to help property owners decide where solar panels, energy storage, and charging infrastructure will deliver the best returns. Deepki claims the combined platform could increase a site’s net operating income by 40% and make underwriting new energy assets 90% faster. The deal gives Camion access to Deepki’s data covering more than 500,000 assets and a customer base of major institutional investors. It is Deepki’s fourth acquisition and its second this year, following the purchase of energy-management company Sobre Energie. | ESG Today

🚧💽 France could attract €210 billion in data-center investment by 2035 as it seeks to secure a place in the global AI infrastructure race, according to the economic consultancy Rexecode. The catch is that only around 30% of the resulting value would remain in France, since much of the hardware comes from American and Asian suppliers, while the highly automated facilities produce relatively few permanent jobs. France has plenty going for it, including abundant low-carbon nuclear power, domestic players such as OVHcloud and Scaleway, and a thriving AI ecosystem. But grid bottlenecks and local opposition over land, water and electricity are mounting. The country currently hosts roughly 350 data centers, yet remains behind the UK, Germany and the Netherlands and is still largely a “passive host” for foreign operators. | Le Monde

Nanobiotix’s Laurent Lévy: "We’re creating a new class of medicines and a potential $6bn blockbuster."

For most biotech companies, the challenge is biological: discovering a new molecule capable of changing the course of disease. Nanobiotix's founders believe that in some cases the answer is physics, not biology.

That conviction has shaped the Paris-based company for more than twenty years. Its lead product, NBTXR3, is now in late-stage clinical development under a global licensing agreement with Johnson & Johnson, with a launch targeted for Q1 2027. Co-founder and CEO Laurent Lévy expects that Nanobiotix could earn up to $1 billion in royalties.

Beyond its lead program, the company is applying the same physics-based approach to build two additional platforms. Nanoprimer is designed to improve the delivery of complex therapies such as RNA medicines and gene therapies. Oocuity, an early-stage neuroscience program, is exploring whether nanoparticles could one day restore communication between neurons damaged by disease.

For Lévy, all three programs rest on the same principle.

"Biology varies enormously from one patient to another," he said. "It's incredibly complex, so it's easy to make mistakes. But the rules of physics apply to everyone."

💸 Top Funding Deals 💸

📇 Company: Eurodia
🏷️ Sectors: DeepTech, CleanTech
🔍 Description: Designs and installs eco-efficient industrial systems for extracting, purifying, and recovering components from complex liquids. Its technologies include electrodialysis, membrane filtration, chromatography, adsorption, and ion-exchange resins, with applications spanning lithium extraction and refining, critical-metals recycling, process decarbonization, and food production.
💻 Website: https://eurodia.com
📍 HQ City: Pertuis
🧗 Round: Growth Equity
💰 Amount Raised: €18 million
🏦 Investors: Starquest Capital, Yotta Capital Partners
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Bernard Gillery
🗞️ News: Starquest Capital and Yotta Capital Partners have acquired minority stakes in Eurodia to support its international expansion and larger industrial projects. Founded in 1988, the company has deployed more than 450 installations across 50 countries and generates over 80% of its business internationally. Revenue increased from €34 million in 2023 to €80 million in 2025. | ESG Today

📇 Company: Neverhack
🏷️ Sectors: Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence
🔍 Description: Provides cybersecurity services covering consulting, managed security, training, incident response, and sovereign AI infrastructure. The group employs more than 1,200 people across 12 countries and reports €220 million in annual revenue.
💻 Website: https://neverhack.com
📍 HQ City: Guyancourt
🧗 Round: Series A
💰 Amount Raised: €11 million
🏦 Investors: Carlyle, IK Partners
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Arthur Bataille
🗞️ News: Existing shareholders Carlyle and IK Partners completed the investment on June 10, 2026. NEVERHACK will use the capital to develop its sovereign cybersecurity AI offering, deploy trusted infrastructure and GPU capacity in France, Italy, and Estonia, and strengthen its technical and commercial teams. The company also appointed founder Arthur Bataille as Executive Chairman and Frédéric Sarrailh as CEO. | Alliancy

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