"The Hottest Startups in Paris"

From Wired, October 6:

Business incubator Station F has supercharged the Paris tech scene, but it’s far from the only show in town.

It feels fitting that Paris’ largest startup campus is 300 meters long—the same size as the Eiffel Tower. Built in an old freight train station, Station F is home to 1,000 early stage startups. Glass-fronted meeting rooms reveal entrepreneurs huddled in meeting rooms or setting up ring lights. Google, Apple, and La French Tech, a government agency, all offer training and advice from their in-house offices here. Station F embodies the success of the support network France has built around its startups, which are now starting to attract significant funding.

In the first three months of the year, France raised $5.4 billion (around €5.3 billion) in VC funding, double the amount raised in the same period last year. There has always been tech talent in Paris, says Clara Chappaz, director of La French Tech. “The ecosystem is now really accelerating and we have the means to go much further, to really fuel this talent,” she says. 

Commune
When Tara Heuzé-Sarmini was invited to a job interview at a co-living company targeting professionals in Germany, she had a realization. “I did not want to do co-living for yuppies working in tech in Berlin,” she says. “I wanted to do something more impactful.” Instead Heuzé-Sarmini and her cofounder Ruben Petri launched Commune, a Paris startup applying the idea of communal living to single parents with young children. One in four French families lives in single-parent households. Yet the country’s housing is still catered toward couples, meaning they often have to move into cramped one-bed apartments to cut costs. Commune, which launched in 2021 and raised €1.5 million (or roughly $1.5 million) in seed funding the following year, plans to offer recently-separated parents the privacy of their own self-contained apartment combined with the community of a communal kitchen and playroom. Their first location in Paris, a former hotel, has space for 22 families and is expected to open in early 2023. commune.house

Kard
Paris is crammed with fintechs. But Amine Bounjou and Scott Gordon think they’ve found a gap in the market: France’s unbanked under-18s. Their company, Kard, offers a bank account with two separate apps: one for kids and one for their parents. Children use their Kard account to spend pocket money or get paid for selling clothes online, while parents use the app to set spending limits and understand their offspring’s shopping habits. So far, 85,000 teens and preteens have been tempted to join by Kard’s meme-heavy Instagram presence and its shiny metallic cards. But Kard doesn’t want to be a kid’s bank forever, and their route to become a retail bank hinges on one clever idea: “People don’t leave their first bank,” says Gordon. The startup has raised a total of €10 million since its launch in 2019, with BlaBlaCar cofounder Francis Nappez among the investors. kard.eu

Offishall
When the pandemic first crashed into Italy, Audrey Barbier-Litvak was managing WeWork offices in southern Europe. It was her team’s job to understand how many people still wanted to work from the company’s Milan coworking space. “It was a nightmare,” she says, describing the spreadsheet they used to keep track of 1,000 people. That experience inspired Offishall, a hybrid-work planning tool which Barbier-Litvak launched in 2020 with cofounders Pierre Godret and Bruno Ronzani. The pandemic created the freedom to choose where you want to work, but this new freedom needs to be organized, she says. Users tell Offishall when they will work-from-home and when they will travel to the office, and use the software to see who else will be in the office on different days. That data can also help Offishall’s clients, such as the world’s biggest luxury group LVMH, understand their team's patterns if they want to downsize or redesign their office. The company raised €1.2 million in August 2021. offishall.io....

....MUCH MORE 

Previously:

The Creator of the iPod and the iPhone Seeks to Dethrone Tech’s Giants 
It’s a crisp January morning in Paris’s 13th Arrondissement, and outside Station F, the former freight terminal that is the epicenter of France’s startup scene, twentysomethings climb out of cars hailed using iPhone apps....

"Going private: France makes sacrifices for its startup nation"

"Station F: A symbol of France's startup ambitions"

Q&A with M. Macron's New Digital Minister, Cédric O, on Tech in France 

"The Race is On for European AI Research"
Profit From The Global Riot Control Industry
"The Top-10 French Artificial Intelligence Startups"
Tony Fadell’s Next Act? Taking on Silicon Valley—From Paris

"French government officials advocate for a €500m investment in blockchain technology"
The country might be better served adding to the €1.5 billion that President Macron has pledged for research in Artificial Intelligence.
But I might be biased.