👋 Inside this week's edition:
👀 Emma Capron, Founder & CEO of Slash Intérim, felt the temp-work sector has been stuck in a time capsule. She decided to jailbreak it. Revenues doubled last year, and the company just raised €6M. Capron explains how she did it, the role of AI, and what's next.
Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand
🚀 Scaling your startup in EMEA?
Learn how high-growth French companies like Pigment use Vanta to grow fast—without compromising on security.
🔐 Turn compliance into a competitive advantage.
📈 Close deals faster with built-in trust.
Tech Talk
☠️🐛 Residents of the quiet village of Poulainville are now stuck living beside what might be France’s most expensive and ickiest ghost house: the shuttered giga-factory of insect-farming darling-turned-disaster Ÿnsect. Once hailed as an agritech pioneer, the startup slid from “next big thing” to “next liquidation case,” leaving 43 employees jobless and French Tech nursing one of its biggest industrial faceplants. Over the years, the company raised $625 million in equity and debt. A last-minute €10 million lifeline and a new CEO brought a brief flicker of hope. But despite mass layoffs and a bargain-basement business model, the money evaporated faster than a fruit fly’s lifespan. Even an extra €8.6 million couldn’t save the company, which failed to raise the funds needed for its grand “continuation plan.” The giga-farm at the heart of the dream never worked as promised, overshooting budgets and undershooting output while global rivals buzzed ahead. Now Ÿnsect joins a growing list of struggling insect startups that are slowly watching their dreams squashed. | Les Echos
Chris O’Brien
Chris O’Brien
🏠☮️ But let us now turn to more hopeful things and cast our gaze westward. For it is in the foggy hills of San Francisco where Hexa, the prolific European startup factory behind hits like Swan, Spendesk, and Aircall, has decided it’s time to plant a flag in the rather stylish 'hood of Cole Valley, the cradle of hippiedom. Hexa House SF is a new live-and-work residence that will host founders for three-month stints, effectively dropping them into the beating heart of the global AI frenzy, where ideas move fast and egos even faster. This move cements Hexa’s full-throttle pivot into AI, following its latest crop of AI-native startups such as Dialog, Basalt, and Tandem. As Hexa CEO Matthieu Gombeaud noted in the announcement, a growing wave of AI-first founders is abandoning Europe for SF (wait, I swear this started off intending to be more upbeat...). On LinkedIn, Hexa Co-Founder Thibaud Elziere says, "more than one in two FR entrepreneurs I meet has already left for SF in the last 6 months or is packing their bags to create their AI startup." Hexa is betting that proximity to the AI frontier is the new entry fee for building something genuinely big. | Hexa PR, FrenchWeb, Maddyness
🤑💰 Okay, let's try this again. Ring Capital just closed its second Altitude fund at €217 million. That's slightly shy of its €250 million target but still a respectable flex in today’s capital-starved market. The firm argues the raise proves that “impact investing” isn’t just a buzzword you sprinkle like so many jimmies on some ice cream (good luck with that culinary reference, my French amigos!), but a real magnet for LPs craving ecological and social transition bragging rights. Altitude II is already off to the races with investments in short-distance carpooling (Karos), grid-balancing tech (Enerdigit), and bringing ophthalmology to medical deserts (Téo). New European LPs like the EIF joined longtime backers such as Bpifrance and Tikehau, giving the fund a more continental flavor. Ring now plans to back 12 to 15 profitable SMEs in sectors like energy, agriculture, and healthcare, where the transition needs are big. | Maddyness
🇫🇷🥖 Clara Chappaz has apparently won the government's digital trifecta. The former boss of La French Tech Mission and former minister for AI and Digital Affairs has officially been tapped as Ambassador for Digital and Artificial Intelligence. In a world where tech diplomacy now matters as much as traditional geopolitics, Chappaz steps in just as 2026 promises a diplomatic marathon with the India AI Summit, the French G7, and the U.S. G20. All she has to do is defend France and Europe against U.S. and Chinese digital superpowers, keep kids off social media, fight disinformation, secure cyberspace, and champion Europe’s tech sovereignty while she’s at it. "We are witnessing a shift in the world," she wrote on LinkedIn. "Digital technology is no longer a geek subject, but a matter of power and domination. Between the United States and China, Europe must assert itself in order to redefine the major global balances and defend its market and its values. Our ability to decide for ourselves and for ourselves is at stake." | LinkedIn, FrenchWeb
✅👑 EuraTechnologies has finally ended its leadership soap opera by naming Emmanuel Durand, the ex–Snapchat France boss and corporate globetrotter, as its new president of the board, effective January 1, 2026. After a governance crisis featuring surprise dismissals, revolving-door interim leaders, and internal grumbling, the embattled incubator is betting that Durand’s eclectic résumé will bring long-overdue stability. That CV includes stints with music labels, cosmetics, Hollywood, and social media. The revamped leadership team, including cybersecurity veteran Chekib Gharbi, is supposed to help EuraTech turn the page on years of turbulence and reclaim its “Ch’tilicon Valley” ambitions without the drama. Now Durand has to figure out how to blend impact, public service, and economic performance at the head of Lille’s flagship tech hub. | Maddyness
👼🌎 Paris nonprofit makesense just closed the first €15 million of its new pre-seed fund, makesense seed II, aiming to bankroll Europe’s next wave of circular-economy and social-impact darlings. Backed by the EIF, Mirova, and a handful of mission-minded angels, the fund is doubling down on founders who can turn waste into value while keeping communities included and investors mildly hopeful. Its first bet is the United Repair Center, a Dutch startup fixing clothes at an industrial scale for brands like Patagonia and Decathlon. | EU Startups
Slash Intérim: The 26-Year-Old Founder Redesigning a €40B Industry
When Emma Capron founded Slash Intérim in 2021, she was barely 21. Too young, some would say, to take on the behemoths of the temp-work sector. Old enough, she believed, to see exactly what wasn’t working.
Capron grew up in a family deeply rooted in temporary recruitment. Her parents launched their own agency 18 years ago. Capron witnessed firsthand how the industry seemed frozen in time. While technology reshaped nearly every corner of the job market, interim work remained stubbornly analog, administratively heavy, and surprisingly hostile to the very people who powered it: the recruiters themselves.
Four years later, Slash Intérim is profitable, national, and reportedly doubling its growth year after year. To accelerate, the startup has just raised its first funding round of €6 million to create a new and durable interim work model.
“I didn’t invent anything,” she insisted. “I just looked at a model that already worked incredibly well in real estate – the independent agent model – and asked myself how to transpose it to interim.”
💸 Top Funding Deals 💸
📇 Company: Evertrust
🔍 Description: French cybersecurity startup specialising in digital certificate management for enterprises and public administrations. Evertrust provides sovereign, independent solutions ensuring the security of websites, emails, software, and connected devices, and is preparing for the post-quantum transition with next-generation certificate technologies.
💻 Website: Evertrust
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Series A
💰 Amount Raised: €10M
🏦 Investors: Elephant
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Kamel Ferfouche (CEO), Jean-Julien Alvado, Étienne Laviolette
🗞️ News: Evertrust will use the funding to expand across Europe by tripling headcount over five years, developing a partner network, and accelerating deployment of its sovereign cybersecurity solutions. The company, already CSPN-certified by ANSSI and aiming for EUCC certification, serves major French enterprises—including a quarter of the CAC40—and is preparing post-quantum certificate technologies. | Maddyness
📇 Company: GetMint
🔍 Description: Platform SaaS dedicated to helping companies measure, understand and optimize how they appear in AI-generated answers across major LLMs (ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, etc.). GetMint enables brands to map their AI visibility, analyze recommendation drivers, and deploy actionable plans to strengthen their presence in conversational search.
💻 Website: GetMint
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Pre-seed
💰 Amount Raised: €4M
🏦 Investors: Founders Future (lead), 50 Partners, Kima Ventures, Clover, Better Angle, and several strategic Business Angels
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Joan Burkovic, Matthieu Poitrimolt, Emmanuel Costa
🗞️ News: GetMint raises €4M to become the leading platform for enterprise visibility and SEO within AI models, accelerating product development and go-to-market in France and internationally.
📇 Company: Corma
🔍 Description: Paris-based SaaS management platform helping IT teams regain control over software usage, spend, and sprawl. Corma’s specialised agents collect licence, user, and usage data to give companies clear visibility into their software stack, enabling better decision-making, reduced spend, and improved security.
💻 Website: Corma
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €3.5M
🏦 Investors: XTX Ventures (lead); Tuesday Capital; Kima Ventures; 50 Partners; Olympe Capital; business angels including Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), Jean-Louis Quéguiner (Gladia), and Doreen Pernel (Scaleway)
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Héloïse Rozès (CEO), Nikolai Fomm, Samuel Bismut
🗞️ News: The funding will support product development, AI buildout, and commercial expansion, addressing growing complexity in software stacks and shadow AI–related risks. | TechEU
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