From Sifted.eu, July 10:
The company's founders, who came from the ranks of Stripe and OpenAI, say Paris is the next place to be for AI startups
The past decades have seen French talent leaking by the bucketload to the US, tempted by Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge companies and the eye-watering salaries they offer. But now the beginning of a counter-trend has started to emerge — with French techies returning home to launch startups — and few companies embody this as well as Paris-based AI startup Dust.
The company was cofounded in the French capital in 2022 by Stanislas Polu, who had returned from a seven-year stint in the US, where he’d been working as a software engineer at OpenAI. Before that, he’d been at Stripe’s Silicon Valley office like his cofounder Gabriel Hubert, who had come back to France a couple of years earlier to lead healthtech unicorn Alan’s product team.
Dust offers a platform for businesses to build a range of custom-made AI assistants that can help with different tasks like meeting preparation or data analysis. It raised a €5m seed round last year from global investors Sequoia Capital, Seedcamp and Connect Ventures and earlier this month it closed a €15m Series A from the same backers.
At the same time, the team opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate reaching €1m in annual recurring revenue (ARR), says Hubert.
The business is still in its early stages, but the founder says, contrary to a few years ago, building an AI company in France, rather than in the US, hasn’t felt like an uphill struggle.
“France is increasingly establishing itself in the AI sector,” says Hubert. “There is still a lot to prove, nothing is done and things are moving quickly — but we’re accelerating.”
“We shouldn’t lie to ourselves: the best place in the world to start a company is Silicon Valley, and the cost of not being there still exists. But it’s not as high as it was 10 or 15 years ago.”....
....MUCH MORE
It's taken a bit longer for France to develop the ecosystems, the connections, than we thought it would take, six - seven years ago but it is indeed happening. If interested see:
"Venture Capital: "These 12 startups could be France’s next unicorns"
French Tech: "Mistral AI secures €105M in Europe’s largest-ever seed round"
This. This is what we've been pitching for the last five years as the way France picks up the economic torch from Germany....
"...Big Tech Alumni building AI startups in Paris"
"France makes high-profile push to be the A.I. hub of Europe setting up challenge to U.S., China"
"Report: France's Macron Seeks Seat at AI Table"
And back into the mists of time (well, the twenty-teens):
"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....Related:
France:
"For Emmanuel Macron, AI is more than a technological revolution. It is
a political revolution of hope in an increasingly dystopian future"
"The Race is On for European AI Research"
Profit From The Global Riot Control Industry
"The Top-10 French Artificial Intelligence Startups"
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.
Tony Fadell’s Next Act? Taking on Silicon Valley—From Paris
I was about to headline this link "The 1600 AI Startups you must know" to play off the "672 thought leaders you must follow on Twitter" or the "37,000 young people who want to take your job" articles but then realized our wary-yet-intrigued readers are not the type of people who respond well to someone saying they 'must' do anything....
