In this edition:
🧠 A frosty Grand Palais, flurries of AI jargon, and one startup quietly redefining Europe’s tech future. Meet Ethiqais: the ethical, sovereign, quietly ferocious AI governance team you’ll soon be hearing a lot more about. Alina Holcroft, CEO of Ethiqais, explains why she is passionate about sovereignty and trust, and why you should be, too.
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.
Headlines
And lo, they gathered under the grand iron, steel, and glass vaulted roof to be inspired by the magnificence of the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées, aka the Grand Palais, to think great thoughts so that they might talk of all things AI...And here it is written of things that did come to pass on Day 1 of this convocation so that those who may read these words might partake in this knowledge and go forth and spread these revelations for the benefit of others so that one day all of humanity might one day find benefit and prosper...
🗞️ In other words, Paris Hosted “Adopt AI” this week. Nine months after hosting the Biggie AI Summit with lots of International Big Shots, the Grand Palais once again turned into La Cathédrale of French AI hype. Adopt AI is a two-day extravaganza billed by some as a “Davos for AI” with an A-list of CAC40 bosses, Big Tech execs, and homegrown AI stars from Kyutai to Owkin.
The event is part geopolitics, part cracking-the-whip-slash-motivating-slash inspiring companies to actually use AI FFS. Your favorite Anglophone correspondents from your favorite Anglophone French tech newsletter were there moderating the hell out of this thing, leaving their blood, sweat, and tears on the conference floor, where they promptly froze in the sub-arctic conditions of the Palais. After leading four discussions on Tuesday, I was placed on injured reserve and was told I may miss up to two weeks of playing time.
With 25,000 attendees and a market drowning in mega-funding, everyone was wondering: are we witnessing the next great wave of adoption or the warm-up act before the bubble pops? Across the Atlantic, the Grand Titan of AI that is NVIDIA appeared to be having a minor anxiety attack over its grip on the AI throne as it tried to politely insist to investors that it was not an Enron-like ponzi scheme (Never ideal when one has to publicly deny such a thing) and that its tech was really still better than Google's chips. Really.
But when it came to talk of AI bubbles, the only kind NVIDIA had in mind at Adopt AI were the ones made in France. WHICH ARE THE ONLY KINDS THAT CAN LEGALLY BE CALLED CHAMPAGNE DO WE HAVE TO TELL YOU AGAIN?
🗞️ Macron Called for "European Preference" in AI Race. What would a giant AI gathering be without President Emmanuel Macron kicking up a fuss? Macron arrived at the end of Day 1 and used his second AI summit to amp up his pro-Europe message: Europe must stop its "non-European preference de facto" and adopt industrial policies that match those of the US and China.
Macron acknowledged that "the US and China are at the forefront today of innovation, LLM capacities and so on," but argued that Europe can compete through aggressive adoption strategies. His pitch centered on France's unique advantages: scaling AI training from 40,000 to 100,000 people annually, nuclear energy capacity that provides "low carbon, pilotable energy," and rapidly deployable infrastructure through Fast Track sites.
Macron announced concrete progress on the €9 billion private investment package secured in February, with 23 sites already secured and a new Dunkirk facility offering over 700 megawatts of capacity. Private investments from companies like Iliad and Brookfield are proceeding alongside public supercomputing projects.
The adoption strategy sets ambitious targets: by 2030, 100% of large corporations, 80% of SMEs, and 50% of very small enterprises must integrate AI. A network of 300 AI ambassadors will support this push. The public sector faces equally aggressive goals, with 50,000 civil servants receiving AI training by the end of 2026, and partnerships deploying Mistral AI for government work and Doctrine for legal services.
Macron sharply criticized past procurement practices, noting "our weakness during the past decades" was to "go first to non-European solutions," calling it "crazy when you are European."
His most pointed rhetoric targeted what he termed Europe's naiveté. "In China, you have a Chinese exclusivity. In the U.S., you have a US preference. The European Union is the only place in the world where you have a non-European preference," he declared, calling for corporations to adopt competitive European solutions and governments to prefer them in procurement.
The European strategy rests on three pillars: regulatory simplification, including GDPR reforms, increased innovation investment through a new common European AI project, and protection through competition rules and sovereignty criteria for EU AI gigafactories. A Franco-German partnership between Mistral AI, SAP, and the two governments exemplifies this approach.
Whether Europe's adoption-first strategy can compete with vertically integrated American and Chinese tech giants remains uncertain. But Macron's message was unambiguous: "It's not a protectionist approach, but this is the only way to develop our own ecosystem and to remain sovereign."
🗞️ Indeed, if there was a major theme on Day 1 of Adopt AI, it might have been: Let's Make Sovereignty Sexy Again. In that photo above, I was leading a discussion for a session called: "From Principle to Practice: Scaling Sovereign AI through Strategic Alliances." It included Audrey Herblin-Stoop, Mistral AI's VP of Global Public Affairs & Communications ; CEO Tobias Diebold of the Dennemeyer Group, an IP practice; Anne-Sophie Lotgering, NTT DATA's CEO of Europe CEO; and Marc de Bourcy, Special Advisor to the Luxembourg government. The focus was on a partnership announced last summer between NTT and Mistral to create sovereign infrastructure and what it had allowed the Luxembourg government and Dennemeyer to do in terms of trusted services.
🗞️ Thales & Dassault Aviaton also ❤️ sovereignty. The dynamic defense duo announced at the conference a plan for "Sovereign Combat AI," a strategic pact to build a fully sovereign AI stack for future air-combat systems that will span drones, fighters, and collaborative mission platforms. Powered by Thales’ cortAIx accelerator, the project promises real-time sensor fusion, tactical planning, and human-supervised decision support, all neatly aligned with the EU’s AI Act. Thales and Dassault insist their defense AI will prioritize reliability and traceability.
🗞️ Clearly, corporates are in need of little AI nudge, because according to a recent ESN study, legacy peeps are still in the slow lane: 85% of execs doubt their systems can handle AI, yet 82% plan a major overhaul within 2 years. Budgets are shifting as maintenance gets slashed while modernization climbs. But financing the upgrade is still the missing piece, according to Le Monde Informatique.
🗞️ Finally (for now), Aramco Ventures is planting a serious flag in Paris. Aramco announced at the show that it will open a new office there in 2026 to run its European AI investment push worth “hundreds of millions of euros.” The Saudi oil giant’s VC arm is betting that Europe’s data-center and AI boom is finally reaching escape velocity despite the continent’s reputation for slow permits and heavy regulation. The company said France won the beauty contest thanks to breakout startups like Mistral, a deep talent bench, and strong state backing for AI. From the Paris hub, Aramco Ventures plans to back AI, cybersecurity, and quantum-computing plays, likely starting with French startups and funds before fanning out across Europe. The move positions Paris as a new gateway for mega-checks into European deeptech, and signals Aramco’s broader sprint to diversify beyond oil into frontier technologies. | Reuters
And now, in non-Adopt AI news...
🗞️ Fresh off its bravura performance of spreading all sorts of long-debunked extreme-right claims about torture at the Bataclan, Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok is back in the crosshairs of French authorities for allegedly circulating Holocaust-denying claims in French. Oh, Grok! You naughty, naughty chatbot! Look at you, you silly AI, echoing classic denialist talking points under a neo-Nazi’s post, falsely reframing Auschwitz’s gas chambers as “disinfection” facilities and hinting at antisemitic conspiracies about shadowy “lobbies.” X at first insisted the posts were fake screenshots, but then eventually took them down. | The Guardian
🗞️ EU Proposes ‘Simplified’ AI & Data Rules. Critics Say It’s a Dangerous Shortcut. As Macron noted above, France and Germany are backing Brussels’ new omnibus plan to loosen GDPR duties and stall parts of the AI Act until December 2027, arguing it will cut red tape for SMEs and free up innovation. But members of the European Parliament and civil-society groups warn that the draft replaces strict oversight with self-assessment, weakens safeguards for high-risk AI, and effectively deregulates core protections, a move opponents say panders to Big Tech just as deepfakes and election interference loom large. | Euronews, Usine Digitale
🗞️ France is plotting a tech-powered upgrade to its tourism machine, Christophe Strobel, Director of Tourism at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the UN Tourism General Assembly in a recent speech, with AI and sustainability at the heart of the plan. Strobel framed AI as a game-changer for everything from hyper-personalized trip planning to smoother operations, backed by the government’s “France Tourisme Tech” program supporting AI startups. But he also stressed “ethical AI,” warning that automation must lift small operators and lesser-known regions rather than steamroll them. To spread the love past Paris, France will spotlight hidden gems such as Normandy and the Loire Valley’s château country, pairing local authenticity with smart tech. The pitch is a greener, more inclusive, AI-enhanced France that keeps its tourism crown while reinventing how the world experiences it. | Travel and World Tour
🗞️ France Taps Doctrine to Turbo-Charge Its Public-Sector Lawyers. Hot off the Berlin tech summit, France has inked a letter of intent with legal-AI startup Doctrine to scale its tools across ministries, from Interior to Defense, where thousands of civil servants already use the platform. The deal isn’t a full contract but a public invitation for competition as the State hunts sovereign AI partners. Doctrine, fresh from acquiring Predictice and backed by Summit Partners, now eyes a 100,000-jurist market long underserved due to public-procurement headaches. For the government, it’s simple: if private-sector lawyers get AI copilots, public agents shouldn’t be stuck in the paper era. | Les Échos
🗞️ SNCF, Meta & Hugging Face Pick 5 AI Startups To Supercharge Mobility. Meta, Hugging Face, and SNCF Connect & Tech have revealed the five winners of their 2026 AI Startup Program, selected from the autumn call for applications. The cohort will get six months of bespoke tech mentoring, access to open-source models, and real SNCF use cases, from accessibility to intermodal mobility. The laureates span visual-impairment navigation (Oorion), multimodal travel (Rayon Libre), AI voice agents (Rounded), emissions-cutting business travel (SoonGo), and no-code software testing (Thunders). All are France-based and required to integrate open foundational models. | Usine Digitale
🗞️ If you're going to use AI to resurrect a dead French playwright for the modern age, it might as well be one whose last play was famously full of poop jokes that he died while performing. Yes, we're looking at you, Molière! A gaggle of French scholars and artists has teamed up with Mistral AI for the "Moliere Ex Machina" project. The group has trained a model on Moliere's work to see what he might have written next. That eventually led to the creation of: "L'Astrologue ou les Faux Presages" (The Astrologer or the False Omens). The story is about a "gullible bourgeois" (is there any other kind?) who is tricked by an astrologer into marrying his daughter to a "deceitful wig maker" (is there any other kind?). The play will be performed next year at the Palace of Versailles. Fans of Beavis and Butt-head, mark your calendars! | Reuters
Other Headlines
🗞️ How Pernod Ricard Stirred Up Employee Enthusiasm for AI | For many businesses, digital transformation fizzles when employees resist, but at Pernod Ricard, buy-in bubbled up as the company carefully nudged employees to embrace new tools powered by artificial intelligence. Its success in gaining staff acceptance surprised Harvard Business School professors Iavor Bojinov and Edward McFowland III, who expected the 200-year-old French spirits company to encounter significant pushback from employees accustomed to selling and marketing products the traditional way—without the aid of AI. | Harvard Business Review
🗞️ Keeping talent is Europe’s biggest challenge in the AI race, warns H Company CEO | The French AI startup’s Gautier Cloix told Euronews Next that while Europe can't compete with US giants on large language models, he believes the continent can succeed with AI agents. | EuroNews
ICYMI
🗞️ How Cybersecurity Startup MokN Combats Phishing With Deceptive 'Fake Doors' | When stolen credentials breached his 'impenetrable' system, Gautier Bugeon had an insight: give attackers fake doors to try. His startup MokN raised €2.6M, hit $1M ARR in 16 months with half its clients being billion-dollar companies, and is now expanding to America. | The French Tech Journal
🗞️ How Phagos Plans to Kill Superbugs with AI and Nature’s Own Viruses | Antibiotics are failing. French biotech Phagos thinks the answer lies in nature’s own bacteria-killers: 'phages.' With €25 million and an AI platform to match viruses with their prey, the startup could rewrite the rulebook on how we fight infection. | The French Tech Journal
🧠 Ethiqais: Building a European AI Champion the Ethical Way
It was a brisk day yesterday at Paris’ Grand Palais, and the Adopt AI Summit was already in full swing. Blue blankets had been handed out to ward off the chill, but even they couldn’t warm up an audience that looked, if anything, a shade bluer than the fabric. Neon-lit stands shimmered under the glass ceiling as attendees bustled, jostled, and debated: Too much regulation? Too little sovereignty?
All while keeping an eye on the clock for French President Emmanuel Macron’s arrival.
Amid the hum of anticipation, I was drawn into a discussion with Alina Holcroft, CEO of Ethiqais. Founded in April last year, Ethiqais’s mission is to help European companies adopt AI safely and responsibly.
With her calm focus cutting through the chatter, Holcroft’s explanations of her company and vision mirrored the summit’s big themes herself: sovereignty, trust, and the tricky art of navigating AI regulation in Europe.
“Our aim is to create a hub where companies can use AI securely and sovereignly in Europe. It’s not just about technology; it’s about values, compliance, and trust,” Holcroft explained.
AI Funding News
For the week ending November 21, there were 7 AI startups that raised a total of €56.9 million.
📇 Company: GetVocal
🔍 Description: Paris-based conversational AI startup developing hybrid human-supervised AI voice agents for enterprise customer service, built on a proprietary “protocol automation” system that encodes business rules with mathematical precision.
💻 Website: getvocal.ai
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Series A
💰 Amount Raised: $26M
🏦 Investors: Creandum (lead), Elaia, Speedinvest
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Roy Moussa (CEO), Antonin Bertin (CTO)
🗞️ News: GetVocal raises $26M Series A—its second round this year—as Voice AI heats up globally, aiming to scale its hybrid human+AI conversational agents, already deployed across 23 markets with customers including Vodafone, Movistar, and Glovo. The company’s architecture blends LLM capabilities with graph-based business protocols and real-time human supervision to deliver reliable enterprise automation and improve agent performance over time. | The French Tech Journal
📇 Company: NcodiN
🔍 Description: DeepTech startup developing photonic interposers with integrated proof-of-concept nanolasers to deliver ultra–high-bandwidth, energy-efficient interconnects for next-generation AI hardware and wafer-scale superchips.
💻 Website: ncodin.com
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €16M
🏦 Investors: MIG Capital (lead, via MIF Fonds 17 & 18), Maverick Silicon, PhotonVentures, Verve Ventures, Elaia, Earlybird, OVNI
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Dr. Francesco Manegatti (CEO), Bruno Garbin, Fabrice Raineri
🗞️ News: NcodiN raises €16M to advance nanolaser-based photonic interposers enabling ultra-high memory bandwidth for future AI “mega-chips.” The round strengthens Europe’s momentum in foundational AI-hardware innovation, highlighting France’s emerging leadership in next-gen photonics. | EU Startups
📇 Company: AI-Stroke
🔍 Description: MedTech startup developing an “AI neurologist” that enables paramedics and triage nurses to detect stroke signs within seconds using a 30-second smartphone/tablet video—accelerating pre-CT triage and improving outcomes.
💻 Website: www.ai-stroke.com
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: $4.6M
🏦 Investors: Heka (BrainTech vehicle of Newfund VC), Bpifrance, prominent angel investors
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Cédric Javault (CEO), Simon Jiafeng Li (CBO), Fabien ORSAT (CTO)
🗞️ News: Funding will support FDA pathway and multi-site U.S. clinical studies. AI-Stroke also added four world-renowned stroke experts to its Medical Advisory Board, including leaders from Stanford, Oxford, UTHealth Houston, and Westchester Medical Center. | PR
📇 Company: Aive
🔍 Description: Paris-based AI platform that automates large-scale video post-production by generating channel-, format-, and audience-optimized variants from a single source asset. Its proprietary orchestration engine analyzes visuals, audio, emotions, and rhythm to produce consistent, brand-safe variations for social platforms, TV, and digital networks.
💻 Website: Aive
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Series A extension
💰 Amount Raised: €4.5M (€16.5M total Series A)
🏦 Investors: N/A
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Olivier Reynaud (CEO), Rudy Lellouche (Co-founder & CPTO)
🗞️ News: Aive has expanded its initial €12M round to €16.5M, reflecting strong investor demand for AI solutions in marketing and video production. Founded in 2019, the company has spent four years and €10M in cumulative R&D to build a proprietary AI engine that reads and interprets the signals of original videos—imagery, sound, emotion, pacing—to generate optimized variants for every media environment automatically. Already adopted by around 50 major clients, Aive’s solution drastically accelerates post-production cycles, enabling campaigns to be adapted in hours instead of days, while ensuring brand coherence and controlled cost-performance. Its technology integrates directly into client environments without intrusive data capture, and adheres to strict governance commitments: customer assets are never reused to train third-party models, ensuring GDPR compliance and protection of brand content. | Infonet
📇 Company: LaFraise
🔍 Description: AI-powered platform streamlining dental care workflows by automating administrative tasks, managing treatment plans, enabling financing options, and ensuring compliance—designed to free dentists’ time so they can focus on patient care.
💻 Website: lafraise.pro
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €3.2M
🏦 Investors: 20VC, Seedcamp, Kima Ventures, Bpifrance
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Arnaud Assous, Florian Duchêne, Matthieu Kern, Victor Schubert, Cédric Turquem
🗞️ News: LaFraise, founded six months ago and already used by 1,200+ dentists in France, raises €3.2M to expand its suite of AI agents and further simplify the dental-care journey for practitioners and patients. | Maddyness
📇 Company: MuchBetter.ai
🔍 Description: An AI-powered training and coaching platform for sales teams, simulating lifelike prospect conversations to improve onboarding, product rollouts, sales techniques, and relational posture.
💻 Website: muchbetter.ai
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €3M equity + €1M debt (total €4M)
🏦 Investors: Educapital, Astorya.vc, Business Angels
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Julien Heissat (CEO & Co-founder)
🗞️ News: MuchBetter.ai raised €4M to accelerate commercial expansion and enhance its AI-driven sales coaching platform, already used by 35,000 employees and generating €1.5M in ARR. | Journal du Net
📇 Company: Aphasix
🔍 Description: AI-powered language-training platform designed for people with aphasia, offering adaptive, continuous rehabilitation between speech-therapy sessions. Exercises adjust to each user's level, analyze incomplete pronunciations, and provide personalized feedback to increase engagement and support long-term recovery.
💻 Website: Aphasix
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €1M
🏦 Investors: Business Angels
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Carole Rinville, Matthieu Rinville, Pierre de Linage
🗞️ News: The funding will strengthen technical and research teams, expand product capabilities, and support wider deployment in France and internationally. The startup is also advancing on its regulatory roadmap, preparing clinical data collection in 2026 to obtain CE Medical Device status, a key milestone toward integration into care pathways and potential reimbursement by national health insurance. Developed with guidance from a scientific committee in neurology, speech therapy, and neuropsychology, the platform aims to provide accessible, continuous rehabilitation tools that patients can use daily between traditional therapy sessions. | Maddyness, Forbes, Les Echos
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🗣️ Announcements 🗣️
🗣️ Microsoft GenAI Studio 3rd Edition | Microsoft France announces the opening of applications for the third promotion of its Microsoft GenAI Studio acceleration program, dedicated to supporting French startups in the adoption and development of solutions based on artificial intelligence. | Deadline: December 3 | Apply here
🗣️ Pioneers AI Lab | The AI Lab unites the top 8 AI builders in Europe every 3 months to build global consumer and prosumer products at STATION F, Paris. | More details on the next application batch
📆 Events 📆
📆 Lovable ❤️ Photoroom: Buildathon! | November 27 | Just Build It is bringing the coolest event for builders, co-organized by Lovable and Photoroom. The only criteria? Ship a product with Lovable and Photoroom (API)! You’ll have 1 hour to turn an idea into a working demo. No slides, no fluff, just bold bets and a working demo. Free credits will be provided. | Join the waitlist
📆 Databricks DATA + AI World Tour Paris | December 2 | This day will be an opportunity to discover concretely how French companies put AI into production, through keynotes and inspiring testimonies from companies such as Decathlon, Danone, Covéa and Michelin. Finally, this event will also be an opportunity to exchange with the executives of Databricks, including Guillaume Brandenburg, RVP and Managing Director at Databricks, Yannis Daubin, Vice President - South Europe, Israel, Middle East & Africa and Samuel Bonamigo, SVP & GM, EMEA. | Register
📆 ai-Pulse | December 4 | Hosted by Scaleway at Station F. Join leaders and engineers for a one-day technical conference dedicated to AI breakthroughs, research, and product demonstrations.| Register
📆 The Blueprint for scaling AI Support: live in Paris | December 4 | AI is transforming customer experience at an unprecedented pace. The AI Agent Blueprint reveals how leaders across customer service, CX, and AI transformation are deploying AI fast, scaling confidently, and achieving measurable business impact. | Register
📆 apidays Paris | December 9 - 11 | CNIT Forest, Paris | As Europe’s capital of tech, policy, and innovation, Paris provides the perfect setting to explore the convergence of APIs and AI. At the heart of this intersection, apidays Paris sparks essential conversations on data security, digital sovereignty, and sustainable innovation in the age of intelligent systems. | Buy Tickets
📆 VOICE AI Space Paris Conference | December 10 | Voice AI Space Paris Conference is part of the Future of Software Technologies Event, a unique federation of 25+ vendor-neutral tech conferences (Apidays, Generation AI, Green IO, and more), bringing together 6000+ participants and 300+ sessions across 3 days. Your ticket also grants full access to 3 days of conferences. | Tickets
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