🧠 Global brands already possess years of customer intelligence. Stravito’s “glass-box” AI helps them find it and use it to test ideas before commissioning yet another costly research project. Check out Stravito's solution here.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

Headlines

🗞️ Mistral AI has signed a multibillion-dollar deal to supply Microsoft with access to its expanding European computing infrastructure, powered by thousands of Nvidia’s latest chips. In return, Microsoft will push Mistral’s models deeper into products such as Foundry and Copilot Studio, while offering customers everything from public-cloud deployments to fully disconnected systems for sensitive workloads. The partnership gives Mistral a powerful new revenue stream just as it is reportedly exploring a €3 billion fundraising at a €20 billion valuation. It is also a striking twist in Europe’s sovereignty debate: the continent’s leading independent AI company is helping an American hyperscaler expand its own European capacity. | Les Echos, Microsoft

🗞️ Nabla has named American health-tech executive Brian Manning as CEO, freeing co-founder Alexandre Lebrun to spend more time leading Yann LeCun’s frontier AI startup, AMI Labs. Manning, who previously helped scale Bamboo Health, PatientPing and Zocdoc, takes over as Nabla pushes deeper into the US healthcare market, where its clinical assistant now supports 100,000 clinicians and 40 million patient encounters a year. Lebrun is not disappearing: he will remain Executive Chairman and Chief AI Officer, overseeing Nabla’s long-term technology and product strategy. The appointment looks like a clear division of labor. Manning is driving commercial expansion while Lebrun focuses on the frontier AI research that could shape Nabla’s next generation of products. | Nabla, Maddyness

🗞️ Raise Summit has been snapped up by British events group Hyve just days after its third edition brought more than 9,000 people to Paris. The deal also includes robotics newcomer Machina Summit and Signal Week, the rebranded Paris Blockchain Week, although the price was not disclosed. Their founders and teams will stay in place, while Hyve explores taking the events international and building what it calls an AI “super vertical.” In 2027, all three conferences will run during the same week at the Palais des Congrès, turning early July into an even bigger fixture on Paris’s tech calendar. | SiliconANGLE

🗞️ The real cost of AI isn’t on Big Tech’s balance sheets. According to Usine Digitale, an estimated $1.65 trillion in future commitments is fuelling the US' 5 major hyperscalers’ AI build-out through long-term contracts and financing vehicles. For Europe, it underlines the enormous capital gap still separating its ecosystem from US giants.  | Usine Digitale

🗞️ French automotive supplier Valeo is moving into defense tech with a new electric motor for Harmattan AI’s drones, developed and manufactured in France. Production is due to begin in early 2027, with the motor designed to avoid heavy rare earths and reduce reliance on vulnerable foreign supply chains. For Valeo, the deal marks its first contract in the drone sector and a test of its strategy to repurpose automotive technology beyond cars. For Harmattan AI, it is another step toward controlling more of the hardware behind its autonomous defense systems. | Valeo, Reuters

🗞️ A heavyweight coalition of French and European companies has launched AION, a bid to build a sovereign AI “gigafactory” in France. The consortium brings together Ardian, Iliad, Orange, EDF, Scaleway, Capgemini, Bull and Artefact, alongside an ecosystem spanning chips, cloud, quantum computing, research and AI startups. France is pitching its low-carbon electricity, data-center expertise and deep talent pool as the ideal foundation for Europe’s next generation of computing infrastructure. The ambition is straightforward but enormous: give European companies access to world-class AI capacity without relying on infrastructure financed and controlled elsewhere. | Capgemini

🗞️ France and Germany are taking another step toward reducing Europe’s reliance on U.S. defense technology, pledging to explore a sovereign alternative to Palantir’s military software. France’s Arcadia platform was singled out as a possible foundation, alongside German solutions, as both countries deepen cooperation on AI, cloud infrastructure and battlefield data. The agreement also covers connected combat systems, autonomous vehicles, long-range missiles and military satellites. Notably absent, however, was any mention of the troubled FCAS fighter-jet program. | Politico

🗞️ The European Parliament is building its own approved AI platform after discovering that lawmakers and staff are already using public chatbots to help draft amendments, speeches and other legislative work. EPGenAI Hub will offer access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Mistral, with more sensitive tasks handled inside Parliament’s own systems. The goal is to curb data leaks, hallucinated legal references and the growing tide of unmistakably AI-written text, although MEPs still face no obligation to disclose when they use it. The irony is hard to miss: the institution writing Europe’s AI rules is embracing largely American models while still preaching digital sovereignty. | The Next Web

🗞️ France’s competition watchdog is warning that the AI agent boom could quickly become a three-company market, with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic already controlling more than 84% of the sector. The regulator says building an agent is getting easier, but reaching scale is another matter, especially when incumbents control distribution, data and the costly computing infrastructure needed to run these systems. Its own experiment found that ChatGPT and Gemini often search very different corners of the web—and do not always tell users which sources shaped their answers. The big concern is that AI agents are becoming the new gateway to online commerce and information, giving a handful of platforms enormous power over what consumers see, buy and trust. | PPC Land

🗞️ Airbus is turning to French cloud provider Scaleway to host sensitive industrial and defense applications, giving a fresh boost to Europe’s push for digital sovereignty. The multi-year deal will support AI tools developed with Mistral and cover everything from aircraft design and engineering to military systems and corporate operations. Airbus plans to migrate around 70 critical applications by the end of 2028, with as many as 900 potentially moving over the next five to six years. The contract value was not disclosed, but the message is clear: for its most sensitive data and AI workloads, Airbus wants European technology under European control. | Reuters

🧠 How Stravito Uses AI to Turn Forgotten Consumer Research Into a Competitive Advantage

Every year, the world's largest consumer brands spend millions trying to better understand their customers.

They commission surveys, organize focus groups, test packaging designs and evaluate advertising campaigns. The resulting reports often shape major commercial decisions, then disappear into shared drives, forgotten PowerPoint presentations and research repositories. A few years later, another team asks many of the same questions all over again.

Stravito believes the problem isn't that companies lack consumer insights. It's that they can't find them.

"There is a lot of information that companies already have but don't know they have," said the Franco-Swedish CEO and co-founder, Thor Olof Philogène. "AI is only as good as the data it uses."

Founded in 2018 by four entrepreneurs with backgrounds in market research and technology, the SaaS startup has built a platform that helps large organizations search, organize, and interact with their existing market intelligence using generative AI.

Today, the company operates as a hybrid-remote team with small offices in Europe and North America, serving more than 100 enterprise customers in both regions with around 120 employees. It made the Financial Times' FT1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies.

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