In the past two years the French capital has been in the throes of AI fever and has launched some of Europe’s most talked-about startups, including Mistral, which is currently valued at $6.2 billion (£4.7 billion). That’s partly due to the support the industry has received. President Emmanuel Macron has given French AI startups some emphatic political backing, while telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel has provided much investment and will to finance national ambition. In September 2023, Niel invested €200 million ($212 million), splitting that money between funding for startups such as Mistral, an AI research lab called Kyutai, and a cloud supercomputer powered by Nvidia. “I’m the old guy who likes entrepreneurs and the idea was always the same: How we can help this talent to stay here, creating companies,” says Niel.
Niel, a prolific French businessman who owns telecommunications company Iliad, believes European AI companies now have a unique opportunity to act. “If you want to create a search engine now from scratch, you cannot win because you weren’t there 25 years ago. It’s exactly the same with AI,” he says. To compete with the US, Europe has to move fast. “[Or] in the end, we will be the nicest place in the world for museums—that’s good but maybe we can try to do something a little bit different.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.wired.com/story/the-hottest-startups-in-paris-in-2024/.
