The French Tech Journal

The leaves are falling, and so is startup funding. In this weekly recap from The French Tech Journal: -- New Wave co-founder waves bye-bye -- French gaming giant Ubisoft is now battling the Big Boss, but for real. -- Startup failures are the hot new thing. ...and a quiet week in funding news 'cause it's a two-week holiday period in France that every parent dreads.

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STATION F companies raised almost €300m in September (€278m to be exact) 🤯 This makes it a record month, beating August 2023 when Hugging Face announced their last round. Also, this brings the total amount raised in 2024 to over €600m. Obviously one big round really swayed the numbers: Alan's €173m series F with Belfius, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Temasek, Coatue and others. Alan was actually one of the first companies we had on campus in 2017 :) But that still leaves a little over €100m raised by other companies, including: - Abolis Biotechnologies (€35m raised w/ L'Oréal, Evonik, Clay Capital and others) - inbolt (€15m raised w/ Exor Ventures, MIG Capital and others) - Jump (€11m raised w/ Breega, Index Ventures, Raise Ventures and others) - Entalpic (€8.5m raised w/ Breega, Cathay Innovation, Felicis and others - this is a company selected for our Climate 10 fellowship) - May (€7m raised w/ Eurazeo, Ring Capital and others) - Lokki (€6,3m raised w/ blisce/, FJ Labs, Silence and others) - Samp (€6m raised w/ Promus Ventures, Kvanted and others) - Bohr Energie (€4m raised w/ Varsity Ventures, Founders Future, AFI Ventures and others) - Presti (YC S24) (€3.5m raised w/ Partech and top angels) - LabLabee (€3.4m raised w/ Reach Capital, Brighteye Ventures and others) - Bib batteries (€2.2m raised w/ SuperCapital, NextGear Capital and others) And many other smaller rounds as well! Congrats to everyone on this excellent milestone 😎 It was a quieter month in terms of M&A however. As you can see, we are seeing more deeptech/climate getting funded. Deeptech & climate in terms of total investment volume is ahead of AI for 2024. For any investors who would like to get our monthly list of fundraising startups, please email investors (at) stationf (dot) co - we will also be hosting our annual demo day featuring our top 40 companies on Nov 13, investors can also request an invitation to participate online. And sorry to any funds that are not tagged - Linkedin limit 🙈

Neoplants has released its first commercial product after almost 6 years of R&D: Neo Px, a bioengineered plant system designed to absorb volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the air to reduce indoor air pollution. 🌱 The product release is a major milestone for co-founders Lionel Mora and Patrick Torbey. It's also a pivotal moment for the Deep Tech startup which must now turn scientific breakthroughs into a real business. That means scaling sales, marketing, logistics, and customer service. 💰 Neoplants' ability to achieve commercial success that matches its scientific accomplishments may demonstrate whether the immense potential of synthetic biology can be harnessed at scale to address global environmental challenges. "Awareness is the number one goal for us," Mora said. "Because we're trying to create this category that sits somewhere between an ornamental plant and an air purifier. And it's not easy to do that." Link to story in the first comment 👇 #deeptech #frenchtech #bioengeering #genetics #greentech #climatech #genome

The French Tech Journal is introducing a new monthly French AI newsletter called: La Machine. The goal is to provide a comprehensive recap of the big stories, funding deals, company foundings, product launches, and policy developments in the French AI ecosystem. 👉 This month, we also talked to Gojob CEO Pascal Lorne about lessons he learned from spending €40M over 15 months to build a GenAI virtual assistant. His takeaway: The pain was worth the productivity gain. 👉 We catch up with Omi CEO Hugo Borensztein about how the company's €13M Series A and a new suite of GenAI-powered tools to help brands create photorealistic images and videos has the company ready to invade the U.S. Market. & More! If you're interested in becoming a sponsor of La Machine, just reach out via LinkedIn! #ai #artificialintelligence

While BeReal.'s fall from grace is now complete, the €500M (-ish) exit represents another milestone in the turnaround of Voodoo. The gaming company defied predictions of its demise several years ago and is now rumored to be on the path to an IPO. Can it use that same magic to resurrect BeReal? Voodoo CEO Alexandre Yazdi seems confident that his company has the engineering, marketing, advertising, and product development talent to cure what ails BeReal. Let's look at some of the numbers behind the deal... 👇