The dramatic new age story of a college student striking it rich with a billion-dollar idea shortly after donning his graduation gown has been the American Dream for much of the 21st century.
While Europe lagged behind in the tech boom, the founders of the still-dominant Google, Meta and Microsoft began their journeys in sweaty dorm rooms at Harvard and Stanford.
But some exciting European startups are proving they won’t be left behind in the AI revolution, as more capital is currently flowing into Paris than any other city on the continent.
French AI startups are the best-funded among their European and Israeli peers, according to Dealroom data analysed by venture capital fund Accel.
Firms including Mistral, Oukine and Hugging Face have helped French AI startups raise the equivalent of $2.3 billion in funding to fuel their fast-growing businesses, more than rivals in other European centres such as Britain and Germany.
The data confirms that Paris universities are a source of new technological talent for France.
Parisian Studies
Arthur Mensch, the 31-year-old CEO of AI unicorn Mistral, may be the most exciting man in France’s burgeoning tech industry, having overseen the massive language-modeling group’s meteoric rise to a market capitalization of $6 billion.
But like many other French founders, he started out at university in Paris.
Around 57% of French founders come from École Polytechnique, a science and engineering-focused university based in Palaiseau, a southern suburb of Paris.
Mensch is one of them, having studied applied mathematics and computer science at the university from 2011 to 2015.
Mistral’s co-founder is also a former Google DeepMind employee, putting him on par with 11% of founders analyzed by Accel who started their careers at Google.
The Pierre and Marie Curie campus of the Sorbonne and Telecom Paris are other major universities in the capital where today’s founders gained their experience.
Meanwhile, the École Normale Supérieure is the school where tech protégés go to thrive: Some 29% of French founders have their work experience there, ahead of Stanford and MIT in the U.S. and AI giants like Google and Facebook. Mistral’s Mensch earned his doctorate at the university in Paris’ 5th arrondissement before moving to Google.
The push for AI capital is prevalent across Europe, with French startups attracting the most funding, while the UK is home to the most Gen AI startups out of the 221 identified by Dealroom.
Universities become founder factories
European universities haven’t always been the home of founders of multi-billion-dollar companies: Entrepreneurs have often pointed to a cultural mismatch that means innovation rarely emerges within the walls of universities on the eastern side of the Atlantic.
But thanks to the AI boom, that’s starting to change.
Harry Nellis, a partner at Accel, has been investing in Europe’s tech ecosystem for two decades and said the landscape has “changed dramatically” in recent years.
He values ”founder factories” – startups spawning new startups.
“Initially, we were investing in entrepreneurs from large French companies who had no prior investment experience.
“The result is that you’re going to have to reinvent the wheel a lot of times,” Nellis said.
Now, Europe’s mature ecosystem is becoming home to several of these founder factories, most importantly universities, with Meta establishing its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) hub in Paris in 2015.
Because AI is based on deep tech and foundational models, it’s not surprising that 38% of European founders held positions in academia, Nellis said.
“This is something that’s really new to the AI wave. It wasn’t the case with the e-commerce wave, for example, or the enterprise software wave. This is something that’s really unique to AI,” he says.
But a threat looms from France’s relatively chaotic political forces.
President Emmanuel Macron called elections last week that could see either the country’s far-left or far-right take power.
The news sent the French stock market plummeting, with the London stock exchange regaining its position as Europe’s largest exchange.
That in itself is unsettling, even without recalling Macron’s pro-business stance.
The president has spearheaded the “Choose France” investment campaign that has brought $16 billion to France from tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon. Any political turmoil in France could lead to a shift in priorities.
But Nélis believes that even a groundbreaking change in France’s ruling class will not be enough to halt France’s hard-won AI dominance.
“I think the AI wave will be so powerful in itself that politics will actually become less important.”
