In this edition:

🧠 James Martin, founder of BetterTech and the FrugalAI training course on the impact of AI, argues that in the rush to win the AI race, too many guardrails are being dismantled. As the Year of AI winds down, Martin surveys the growing risks.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

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Headlines

🗞️ Yann LeCun ain't messin' around. His Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) lab is already in talks to raise around €500 million, a round that could value the Paris-based lab at nearly €3 billion, according to the Financial Times. Now, AMI has announced that it will partner with French healthtech startup Nabla, but with a little extra twist: Nabla CEO Alex LeBrun will become CEO of AMI, while staying on as Chairman and Chief AI Scientist at Nabla.

"I’ve worked closely with Yann for years, and I couldn’t be more excited about what this unlocks for healthcare AI and for Nabla’s next chapter," LeBrun wrote on LinkedIn.

LeBrun disclosed that Nabla had tripled its "live ARR this year" to $1B. The partnership gives Nabla early access to AMI’s cutting-edge world models, an emerging class of AI designed to understand the physical world, overcome the limits of LLMs, and enable deterministic, regulator-ready systems. LeCun’s ambition is to spark the next great revolution in AI with systems capable of reasoning, planning, and interacting with the real world, not just predicting text. For Nabla, already deployed across more than 150 health systems, this could translate into a decisive edge in building the first truly agentic, FDA-certifiable clinical AI. More broadly, it positions both companies at the center of a post-LLM shift that’s rapidly attracting attention from giants like Google, Nvidia, and the global AI research elite. | Nabla, LeBrun on LinkedIn, Maddyness

🗞️ Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 enjoyed another fleeting moment of indie glory this week, winning both Game of the Year and Best Debut at the Indie Game Awards. But the trophies were abruptly pulled a few days later because the game shipped with a small number of generative AI assets, later patched out, but still enough to violate the awards’ submission rules. While developer Sandfall Interactive had acknowledged limited AI use earlier in the year, the Indie Game Awards say the studio confirmed on premiere day that gen AI art was indeed used in production, triggering an automatic disqualification. The decision reignited the industry’s simmering debate over AI in game development, where transparency now matters as much as creative ambition. The vacated awards have since been reassigned, but it's a bit of a blemish and controversy to end an otherwise incredible year for the Montpellier studio, which just won Game of the Year at the Game Awards earlier in the month. | Polygon

🗞️ A 17-year-old from Burkina Faso sent shockwaves through French social media by using AI to fabricate a video announcing a coup d’état in France, complete with fake TV reporters, police lights, and the Eiffel Tower in the background. "Unofficial reports suggest that there has been a coup in France, led by a colonel whose identity has not been revealed, along with the possible fall of Emmanuel Macron. However, the authorities have not issued a clear statement," a female reporter says. The clip went massively viral in early December, racking up more than 12 million views and even prompting public irritation from President Emmanuel Macron, who said Facebook refused to take it down. "On Sunday (14 December), one of my African counterparts got in touch, writing 'Dear president, what's happening to you? I'm very worried,'” Macron told readers of one French local newspaper. Ironically, the teenager’s supposed money-making stunt earned him just seven euros, though it did deliver instant notoriety. | AFP, EuroNews, France 24, RFI

🗞️ Revaia has joined forces with Tikehau Capital to back the next growth chapter of Intersec, a European software leader whose AI-powered platforms quietly run some of the world’s most critical public safety systems. For more than 20 years, Intersec of France has analyzed vast streams of metadata and location signals in real time, enabling governments and telecom operators to act instantly at a country scale. Its AI-driven technology underpins population alerting, emergency response, and homeland security use cases by detecting patterns, identifying risks, and triggering action within seconds. The investment reflects a shared ambition to accelerate AI-led product innovation, expand globally, and pursue targeted acquisitions, while preserving Intersec’s European, sovereign approach to sensitive data. Unlike surveillance-heavy models, Intersec’s AI extracts insight from metadata without accessing communications content, aligning advanced analytics with strict privacy and regulatory expectations. For Revaia, the deal also marks an evolution, its second buyout, a strategy to give a proven AI platform the governance simplicity and capital needed to scale faster. | Revaia Blog Post

🗞️ Clem Delangue, Co-founder & CEO at Hugging Face, dropped a quickie update on the company's robotics progress: "In April this year, we acquired a small (but mighty) robotics company from Bordeaux, France. This weekend, thanks to them, we're shipping 3,000 Reachy Minis all over the world (half of them in the US). That's the power of international collaboration and open-source robotics (and hard work haha)!" | LinkedIn

🗞️ French retail investors are increasingly turning to AI for guidance, according to the Autorité des Marchés Financiers' (AMF) 2025 Savings and Investment Barometer. Interest in equities is at its highest level since 2017, with 35% of French people planning to invest in the stock market over the next year, and confidence in equities continuing to rise. At the same time, perceptions of risk are falling, both for stocks and for crypto-assets, which are now seen as high-risk by fewer than half of respondents. A striking new data point this year: 11% of French people already use artificial intelligence to inform their investment decisions, surpassing social media and influencers, with under-35s leading the charge. AI is mostly used to better understand products and tailor investments to personal needs, reflecting a broader shift toward investor autonomy. | AMF

ICYMI

🗞️ Gradium Wants To Make Voice The New Operating System for AI |The Paris startup, spun out of research lab Kyutai, just emerged from stealth with a $60M seed round to become the global foundation layer for real-time voice interactions. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ How HyprView Is Using Photonics And AI To Bring Cancer Diagnostics Into the Light | Thanks to developments in AI, photonics is stepping out of the lab and into the clinic. HyprView uses light to uncover the invisible biology inside tumors - information microscopes miss entirely - opening the door to faster, smarter, and far more predictive cancer diagnostics. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ Ex-Doctolib Team Deploys AI Agents To Fix France's Dysfunctional Dental System | La Fraise recently raised €3.2M to boost the nation's low quote acceptance rate by using AI to create greater transparency for recommended procedures. | The French Tech Journal

🧠 Guest Post: Why AI will have to be more responsible in 2026

We know. It’s been a crazy few years in AI. As this very newsletter attests, it’s been hard enough to keep track of the frenetic AI startup fundraising activity in 2025 . But it’s not just startups.

This was the year staff worldwide, in companies of all sizes, were given access to corporate LLM accounts with very little guidance on how to use them. At the same time, the risks of unchecked usage of generative and agentic AI became hard to ignore.

Beyond company-level considerations, 2025 also marked a fundamental shift in how AI operates in the world. The technology moved from being a helpful assistant to an autonomous agent that acts on your behalf: booking meetings, writing code, managing databases, and even making purchasing decisions.

Meanwhile, the competitive pressure to adopt AI became almost unbearable, with some companies even citing fear of missing out as their number one AI-related risk (way greater than their fear of getting it wrong). With the stakes rising, governments pushed to loosen rules so as not to lose the economic development battle to other regions.

The result was a perfect storm of powerful technology, widespread deployment, and governance that seemed to heighten risks.

AI Funding News

For the week ending December 19, there were 6 AI startups that raised a total of €101.8 million.

📇 Company: SkillCorner
🔍 Description: Paris-based sports intelligence company providing AI-driven player and ball tracking and contextual performance data from broadcast video. SkillCorner pioneered single-camera automated tracking and serves teams, leagues, and federations across soccer, basketball, and American football, supporting scouting, recruitment, tactical analysis, and player development.
💻 Website: SkillCorner
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Growth investment
💰 Amount Raised: $60M
🏦 Investors: Silversmith Capital Partners (lead); existing shareholders include the NBA and Seventure Partners
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Hugo Bordigoni (CEO), Charles Montmaneix (Co-Founder & General Manager)
🗞️ News: SkillCorner raised $60M from Silversmith Capital Partners to accelerate product innovation, scale data engineering and product teams, and expand multi-sport operations—particularly in North America. The company covers 180+ competitions and serves more than 300 organizations globally, while continuing to operate independently from its Paris headquarters. | PR

📇 Company: Ankar
🔍 Description: AI-powered platform designed to simplify and accelerate the patenting of innovations. Ankar provides a unified solution covering the full patent lifecycle—from idea validation to drafting and prior art analysis—helping companies protect and better monetize their intellectual property in the age of generative AI.
💻 Website: Ankar
📍 HQ City: London, United Kingdom
🧗 Round: Series A
💰 Amount Raised: $20M (on top of $4M previously raised)
🏦 Investors: Atomico (lead), Index Ventures, Norrsken, Daphni
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Wiem Gharbi, Tamar Gomez (French co-founders)
🗞️ News: Founded by two former Palantir executives, Ankar raised a $20M Series A to scale its AI-driven patent management platform. Used by Fortune 500 companies such as L’Oréal and law firm Vorys, the solution analyzes over 150 million patent filings and 250 million scientific publications to help companies identify, shape, and protect patentable innovations. The funding will be used to double the team from 20 employees and accelerate international expansion, particularly in the U.S., with the ambition of becoming the core software infrastructure for global innovation in the AI era. | Maddyness, FrenchWeb

📇 Company: Arcads.ai
🔍 Description: French AI startup offering an automated video marketing platform using AI actors to industrialize short-form content production for social media. The platform enables rapid generation and localization of UGC-style videos, product demos, unboxings, and fashion try-ons in more than 35 languages, designed for high-volume, performance-driven marketing teams.
💻 Website: Arcads.ai
📍 HQ City: Paris (planned expansion to San Francisco)
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €14M
🏦 Investors: Eurazeo (lead), Alpha Intelligence Capital, Sequoia Scout Program, international investors
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Dylan Fournier, Romain Torres
🗞️ News: Arcads.ai raised €14M in its first institutional round to accelerate the industrialization of AI-generated video marketing. Founded in 2024, the company reports more than 6,000 customers, over 100,000 videos produced per month, and a user base primarily located in the United States. The funding will support product development and international expansion, with a planned presence in San Francisco to better serve the U.S. market, where digital video advertising spend continues to scale rapidly. | FrenchWeb

📇 Company: Lucis
🔍 Description: French preventive healthcare startup offering AI-supported health check-ups conducted in certified laboratories and interpreted by a medical team. Lucis provides individuals with a structured, preventive view of their health based on more than 180 biomarkers, delivering actionable insights across nutrition, physical activity, sleep, recovery, and mental health without replacing physicians or providing medical diagnoses.
💻 Website: Lucis
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €7.2M ($8.5M)
🏦 Investors: General Catalyst (lead), Y Combinator, Kima Ventures, Motier Ventures, Circle.Co, North South Ventures, plus business angels
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Maxime Berthelot (CEO), Baptiste Debever, Max Gueroi
🗞️ News: Lucis closed a €7.2M Seed round to accelerate its European expansion, scale its preventive health platform, and grow its network of partner laboratories and physicians. Founded in 2025 and backed by̦ by Y Combinator, the startup has already conducted more than 500,000 clinical tests across France, the UK, Ireland, and Portugal. Lucis operates on a subscription model and positions itself as a preventive and educational health platform, combining AI-driven analysis with human medical validation to help users understand health trajectories before symptoms appear. | EU-Startups, Maddyness

📇 Company: Edailabs
🔍 Description: French AI edtech startup developing Emma, an English-learning application focused on oral fluency rather than written exercises. The app uses a 3D AI avatar as a personal tutor, offering personalized conversation scenarios, real-time feedback on pronunciation and grammar, and motivation through daily engagement features.
💻 Website: Edailabs
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €5M
🏦 Investors: Educapital, Breega, Yellow Ventures, Seedcamp, DMG Ventures
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Étienne Genvrin (CEO)
🗞️ News: Edailabs raised €5M to accelerate the development of Emma, its AI-powered English tutor emphasizing spoken language skills. Launched in January, the app already claims 500,000 users. Built on an OpenAI model and enhanced through proprietary prompt engineering inspired by the founder’s language-learning methodology, Emma positions itself against Duolingo and Babbel by prioritizing oral fluency via a 3D avatar available 24/7. The company plans to expand beyond English, with Spanish currently in development. | Les Echos

📇 Company: Miura Simulation
🔍 Description: French deeptech startup providing a data-centric platform that unifies fragmented simulation and engineering workflows. Through its Miura Nexus platform, the company helps industrial players in aerospace, energy, and automotive centralize simulation data, ensure traceability, and deploy AI to accelerate design cycles.
💻 Website: Miura Simulation
📍 HQ City: Nantes
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €2M
🏦 Investors: Atlantique Business Angels Booster, Pays de la Loire Participations, Centrale Innovation, Arts et Métiers Business Angels, Aerospace Angels; with banking support from Bpifrance, Crédit Agricole, Caisse d’Épargne, Crédit Mutuel
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Jose Aguado, Domenico Borzacchiello, Jordi Gómez
🗞️ News: Founded in 2020, Miura Simulation raised €2M to expand operations and accelerate development of Miura Nexus, its data-centric platform designed to replace siloed and locked simulation ecosystems. The company targets industrial sectors such as aerospace, energy, and automotive, enabling AI-driven simulation and faster engineering design cycles. | Finsmes

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