🤖 In this week's edition:

🧠 As AI conversations replace search as the starting point for online shopping, Paris startup Lemrock wants to ensure brands don’t disappear from the buying journey. The deeptech company has raised $7M to build the infrastructure that connects retailers directly to AI agents.

🧠 The Paris-based Qevlar AI just raised $30M to move beyond alert investigation and into security intelligence. Its secret weapon is knowing when not to use an LLM.

🧠 Station F’s F/AI Cohort brings together 20 AI startups that have already raised €34M—and are now racing to reach €1M in revenue within just six months. Backed by OpenAI, Meta, Google, and leading VCs like Sequoia and Lightspeed, this inaugural batch is composed largely of startups less than a year old, building across AI infrastructure, agents, and enterprise tools, and scaling at remarkable speed. Dig into the full list.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

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Headlines

🗞️ Mistral AI used Nvidia’s big GTC event in Silicon Valley to sharpen its pitch as the enterprise-focused alternative in the AI race, announcing both its role as a founding member of the new Nemotron Coalition and the launch of Mistral Forge. The message was all about control: Mistral wants companies and governments to build custom AI models from scratch on their own data, not just lightly tune someone else’s system. That fits its broader effort to position itself as the open, Europe-friendly counterweight to U.S. rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, especially for customers worried about compliance, sovereignty, and lock-in. So while others chase mass-market AI buzz, Mistral is using a marquee industry stage to argue that the bigger opportunity is helping enterprises build AI their own way. | Mistral AI, TechCrunch, Nvidia

🗞️ As only circa 44% of France's eligible voters headed into its municipal elections last Sunday, a wave of apps is trying to coax younger voters back to the ballot box with a little help from AI and some well-placed notifications. Developers and public institutions are experimenting with digital nudges to make civic duty feel slightly less… dusty. One newcomer, Citoyen Informé, lets users swipe through candidates’ proposals Tinder-style while an AI assistant trained on publicly available campaign programs answers questions and clarifies policies. Meanwhile, the French government’s information service has teamed up with popular platforms to push reminders about voting, and apps like WeWard are even gamifying the trip to the polling station by rewarding users for walking there. The strategy: meet younger voters where they already are: on their phones. And hope democracy can sneak in between a swipe, a match, and a step counter. | Les Echos

🗞️ French TV giant Canal+ used its first full-year results since listing in London to signal a clear pivot into AI and global content, unveiling partnerships with Google Cloud and OpenAI alongside a new drama tie-up with Sky. The Google deal focuses on heavy-duty AI infrastructure, from smarter content indexing to generative video tools. OpenAI is being tapped to boost personalization across its app. Together, the moves show Canal+ leaning hard into AI to improve discovery, production, and user experience as streaming competition intensifies. At the same time, the Sky partnership underscores its push into English-language drama, aiming to co-produce multiple series a year for global audiences. The strategy comes amid mixed financials and a bruising admission that its Showmax venture was an “expensive failure,” putting more pressure on these new bets to pay off. | Deadline

🗞️ A clutch of French scale‑ups like Mistral AI, Pigment, and Ekimetrics are proving that crossing the Channel is more than symbolic. It’s strategic. London’s deep talent pool, established enterprise market, and substantial AI funding (more than £44 billion invested since 2024) have made the UK a launchpad for French tech aiming to scale internationally. Ekimetrics opened its London office way back in 2013 and now generates a large slice of its revenue from the UK; Pigment says the British market is one of its fastest‑growing; and Mistral has inked partnerships with big names like HSBC and King’s College London while tapping top‑tier UK AI talent. Their playbook is Paris roots, London growth, and a broader Franco‑British cooperation that could shape Europe’s tech footprint amid rising competition. | Maddyness (UK)

🗞️ Notion is betting big on AI agents to reinvent the digital workplace- and it’s looking to France to help make that happen. The productivity platform, beloved by designers and project managers, is rolling out tools that let users create custom agents capable of summarizing meetings, updating docs, sorting tasks, or generating reports automatically. The twist: employees can build these agents themselves in minutes, no coding required. It’s a strategic push to compete with heavyweight office suites from Microsoft and Google. Conveniently, France is already one of Notion’s strongest footholds: the company says 90% of the French Tech 120 and 80% of the CAC 40 use the platform in some capacity. The bet now is that “agentic” workflows could turn those scattered team experiments into full-blown enterprise adoption. | L’Usine Digitale

🗞️ An autonomous AI agent has managed to hack the internal chatbot of McKinsey & Company in just two hours, highlighting how quickly “agentic AI” can turn into a cybersecurity headache. In a controlled red-team test, a security startup, CodeWall, unleashed an AI agent on Lilli, McKinsey’s internal AI platform used by more than 40,000 consultants. The bot quickly discovered vulnerabilities and gained read-and-write access to massive amounts of data - including tens of millions of chat messages and hundreds of thousands of internal files. The flaw has since been patched, but the stunt underscores a growing risk: AI agents can now automate the tedious parts of hacking at machine speed. For European companies, especially consulting, finance, and tech firms heavily adopting generative AI, the message is clear: before deploying fleets of helpful AI coworkers, make sure they’re not accidentally opening the door to a few very efficient robot burglars. | L’Usine Digitale, Financial Times

🗞️ Meta is trimming the sails in its generative AI race, planning to cut roughly 20% of its workforce. That’s about 15,000–16,000 jobs globally. For France, where Meta employs a comparatively tiny team, the impact is likely to be dozens of roles at most, mostly from local support or office functions rather than engineering. The layoffs come even as the company continues to spend heavily to catch up in AI, highlighting the brutal trade-off between ambition and headcount. | L’Usine Digitale, The Verge

Other Headlines

🗞️ The French AI startup gunning for Workday, Oracle, and SAP | For Eléonore Crespo, the French attitude of “jamais content,” or never happy, is a business strategy, not a stereotype. The Paris-trained fundamental physicist turned co-founder and CEO has built Pigment around a French-flavored “Never Settle” ethos—an aggressive refusal to be satisfied that’s now powering one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI software companies. | Fortune

🗞️ A backlash against data centres is spilling into French municipal election races | A French municipal candidate in Le Bourget is campaigning against a planned AI data center, arguing it would worsen pollution, strain infrastructure, and deliver few local jobs. His stance is part of a wider trend: candidates in at least 10 French cities, including Marseille and Bordeaux, are now pushing back on data center expansion, reflecting growing voter concern — and a broader backlash across Europe and the U.S. as AI infrastructure turns into a political flashpoint. | Reuters

ICYMI

🗞️ Europe's AI Reckoning: Caught Between Regulation, Rivalry, and Risk | As 2026 begins, France and the European Union find themselves at the center of a perfect storm, facing diplomatic confrontation with Washington, urgent safety crises, and mounting questions about whether their regulatory approach can survive first contact with geopolitical reality. | The French Tech Journal

🧠 Lemrock and the Rise of Agentic Commerce: Infrastructure for a New Discovery Layer

The way we shop online is being quietly rewritten as consumers shift from search engines to conversational AI. Startups like Lemrock are emerging to help brands stay visible in this new paradigm, where product discovery happens inside tools like ChatGPT rather than on traditional e-commerce sites. With $7M in fresh funding and over 60 brands onboarded, Lemrock is building the infrastructure layer for what it calls “agentic commerce.” Its platform connects retailers to AI agents, enabling real-time, personalized product recommendations directly within conversations. The stakes are high: as AI becomes the new gateway to purchasing decisions, brands that fail to adapt risk disappearing from the customer journey altogether.

🧠 Putting Out the Fire and Finding What Started It: Qevlar AI’s Bet on Autonomous Security Intelligence

What happens when you let AI make cybersecurity decisions at scale, and it can’t give the same answer twice? That’s the paradox Qevlar AI is tackling with its newly raised $30M, as it builds an autonomous security operations platform designed to replace inconsistent LLM-driven workflows. Instead of relying purely on large models, Qevlar combines multiple AI systems to deliver more reliable, explainable, and cost-predictable outcomes. The result: dramatically faster investigations and growing adoption across major enterprise customers in Europe and the U.S.

The bigger question remains: can this hybrid approach finally make AI trustworthy enough to run security on its own?

🧠 Station F’s F/AI Cohort: 20 AI Startups, €34M Raised, and a Race to €1M Revenue in 6 Months

Station F’s inaugural F/AI cohort brings together 20 early-stage AI startups already showing strong momentum, with €34M raised and most founded within the past year. Backed by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and top VCs such as Sequoia and Lightspeed, the program is designed to help companies reach €1M in revenue within just six months. The cohort spans key AI battlegrounds—from infrastructure and agent reliability to AI-native commerce and marketing. What stands out is how early these companies are—and how quickly they’re scaling. It’s a clear signal that Europe is accelerating in the global race to build foundational AI companies.

📆 Events 📆

📆 OpenClaw Meetup Paris 🦞 | March 19 | 6:00 PM–10:00 PM | Artverse Gallery, Paris | An evening of demos and discussions at the intersection of AI agents and Web3, bringing together developers, founders, and builders shaping the future of autonomous AI. Expect live demos of AI agents, lightning talks from early adopters, and open Q&A with the Paris AI × crypto community — plus drinks and networking with some of the ecosystem’s most forward-thinking builders. | Request to join

📆 Fin x Anthropic: Building Trust in AI Agents | March 25 | 5:30 PM–8:30 PM | Paris | A deep dive into what it takes to move AI from pilot to production in enterprise environments. Join leaders from Intercom (Fin) and Anthropic to explore how trust is built across AI systems — from safety frameworks like Constitutional AI to guardrails, QA loops, and ROI-driven deployment. Expect candid insights on enterprise adoption, buyer psychology, and scaling AI agents both internally and customer-facing. | Request to join

📆 Cursor Meetup Paris | March 26 | Paris | Paris’s first Cursor community meetup of 2026, bringing together engineers, product managers, designers, founders, students, and AI/tool enthusiasts for an evening of networking, live Q&A with an engineer from the Cursor team, lightning showcases from the community, and casual social time with pizza and drinks — open to all AI builders and creators looking to connect and share insights. | Request to Join

📆 OpenText Summit Paris 2026 | April 15 | Palais Brongniart | AI is everywhere and full of promise — but without contextualized data, governance, and security, AI fails. Join OpenText Summit Paris 2026 to discover how to unlock the intelligence of your enterprise data and activate AI with confidence. Expect visionary keynotes, French customer success stories, real-world use cases, in-depth small-group sessions, live demos, expert meetings, and peer networking. Explore the latest innovations in content management, cybersecurity, service management, business networks, and more — and learn how to deploy responsible, compliant AI with full control and freedom of choice. | Register

📆 Paris Blockchain Week 2026 | April 15–16, 2026 | Carrousel du Louvre, Paris | Europe’s premier gathering for the institutional digital asset ecosystem, bringing together 10,000+ founders, investors, policymakers, and corporate leaders from 100+ countries. The event covers the future of digital finance — from tokenized assets and stablecoin payments to institutional custody, regulation, and market infrastructure — through keynotes, panels, startup competitions, and high-level networking. | Get tickets

📆 AI Now Summit by Mistral AI | May 28 | Paris | A one-day summit focused on moving AI from theory to real-world impact, bringing together tech leaders, builders, researchers, and executives deploying AI at scale. Hear from global CEOs, Mistral’s founders, and leading practitioners on building production-ready AI systems, scaling from pilots to enterprise use cases, and unlocking measurable business value across industries. | Register

📆 VivaTech 2026 | June 17–20, 2026 | Paris Expo Porte de Versailles | Europe’s largest startup and technology event returns for its 10th anniversary, bringing together 180,000+ attendees, 14,000 startups, 3,600 investors, and thousands of global tech leaders. Expect world-class speakers from companies like NVIDIA, Mistral AI, Hugging Face, Meta, and Anthropic, alongside startup showcases, investor meetings, product launches, and major conversations shaping the future of AI, tech, and innovation. | Get tickets

📆 RAISE Summit 2026 | July 8–9, 2026 | Carrousel du Louvre, Paris | Join one of Europe’s most influential AI gatherings bringing together thousands of builders, investors, executives, and innovators to shape the future of artificial intelligence. Learn from global leaders through keynotes, panels, workshops, a hackathon, startup competitions, and high-impact networking — all curated to accelerate AI strategy, investment, and real-world deployment across industries. | Tickets

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