The Hottest Startups in Paris

it feels right The largest startup park in Paris is 300 meters long and as big as the Eiffel Tower. Station F was built on an old freight train station and is home to 1,000 early-stage startups. Glass-walled meeting rooms showcase entrepreneurs cramming into meeting rooms or setting up ring lights. Google, Apple and the government agency La French Tech all provide training and advice from their internal offices here. Station F embodies the success of the support network that France has built around its startups, which are now starting to attract significant funding.

In the first three months of this year, France raised $5.4 billion (5.3 billion euros) in venture capital funding, double the amount in the same period last year. Paris has always had tech talent, said Clara Chappaz, director of La French Tech. “The ecosystem is really accelerating right now, and we have ways to go even further and really power this kind of talent,” she said.

commune

Tara Heuzé-Sarmini got an idea when she was invited to interview for a job at a co-living company for professionals in Germany. “I don’t want to live with a yuppie working in tech in Berlin,” she said. “I wanted to do something more impactful.” Instead, Heuzé-Sarmini and her co-founder Ruben Petri started Commune, a Parisian startup that applies the idea of ​​public life to single parents with young children parents. A quarter of French families live in single-parent households. However, housing in the country is still geared towards couples, which means they often have to move into cramped single-person apartments to keep costs down. Launching in 2021 and raising €1.5 million (or roughly $1.5 million) in seed funding the following year, Commune plans to offer recently separated parents the privacy of their own separate apartment, as well as a community with a communal kitchen and game room. Their first location in Paris is a former hotel, accommodating 22 families, expected to open in early 2023. commune

card

Paris is crowded 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 parents. Children use their Kard accounts to spend pocket money or get paid for selling clothes online, while parents use the app to set spending limits and learn about their offspring’s shopping habits. So far, 85,000 teens and pre-teens have been drawn to Kard’s meme-heavy Instagram presence and shiny metal cards. But Card doesn’t want to be a kid’s bank forever, and their path to becoming a retail bank hinges on a bright idea: “People don’t leave their first bank,” Gordon said. Since its inception in 2019, the startup has raised a total of 10 million euros in funding, including BlaBlaCar co-founder Francis Nappez. Card.eu

Ofishal

Audrey Barbier-Litvak was running WeWork offices in southern Europe when the pandemic first hit Italy. It’s her team’s job to find out how many people still want to work in the company’s Milan co-working space. “It was a nightmare,” she said, describing the spreadsheet they used to track 1,000 people. This experience inspired Offishall, a hybrid work planning tool launched in 2020 by Barbier-Litvak with co-founders Pierre Godret and Bruno Ronzani. The pandemic has created the freedom to choose where you want to work, but this new freedom requires organizing, she said. Users tell Offishhall when to work from home and when to go to the office, and use the software to see who else is in the office on different days. The data can also help Offishall’s clients, such as LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods group, understand patterns in their teams as they downsize or redesign their offices. The company raised €1.2 million in August 2021. offfishall.io

Omie & Cie

Christian Jorge has proven that he can make startups successful. He is one of the co-founders of secondhand fashion site Vestiaire Collective, which was valued at $1.7 billion last year. Working with co-founders Joséphine Bournonville, Coline Burland and Benoit Del Basso, his next venture tackles the climate crisis by focusing on food rather than clothes. Launched in 2021, Omie & Cie hopes to revolutionize online grocery shopping through transparency. Every Omnie product, from ketchup to eggs, comes with a breakdown of where the ingredients come from, how profits are distributed, and any packaging waste. The company says 5,000 households use its website to buy all their groceries. It has raised €4 million to date, with investors including French chef Thierry Marx. omie.fr

green space

Alexis Normand, who co-founded the company in 2019 with Matthieu Vegreville and Arnaud Delubac, said Greenly’s goal is to make carbon accounting more accessible. Much of the startup’s business stems from helping small and medium-sized businesses figure out how much carbon can be saved by switching to greener data centers or buying greener laptops. About 60,000 people also downloaded the company’s app, which analyzes users’ bank accounts to estimate emissions associated with transactions at gas stations or supermarkets. Greenly’s technology has been integrated into banking applications run by French banking group BNP Paribas and raised €21.5 million as part of a Series A funding round in April 2022. green earth

Maki

In less than a year, Paris-based startup Maki has built an HR platform that aims to replace resumes with gamified online tests aimed at making the hiring process more efficient and fair. Maki’s three co-founders, Maxime Legardez, Paul-Louis Caylar and Benjamin Chino, launched in November 2021 and have so far recruited 220 companies to use their platform, including McDonald’s in France. Maki’s platform offers tests to assess candidates’ personality, cognitive abilities, their comfort level with tools like Excel, and their soft skills, such as their ability to give and receive feedback. To date, the company has secured 11 million euros in funding. makipeople.com

Kinetix Technology

Virtual reality avatars can often walk and run, but they can’t perform custom TikTok moves or replicate a footballer’s victory dance. Yassine Tahi and gamer Henri Mirande see this as a problem. They want to enable people to express themselves in VR and future iterations of the metaverse. So the two co-founded Kinetix Tech in 2020, a platform that enables their user base of 25,000 people to turn videos of themselves dancing into animated avatars that can be imported into virtual worlds like Roblox without any 3D animation experience middle. The startup raised $11 million in seed funding in May, with virtual world The Sandbox and ZEPETO participating in the round. kinetix.tech

Houma Games

When Netflix launches squid gameDaniel Nathan, who launched Homa Games with co-founder Olivier Le Bas in 2019, said gamers want to play games that have the same storyline as the hit TV series. The company is a game publisher that provides free tools to indie developers so they can create and distribute their ideas quickly enough to react to pop culture moments. Developers can use Homa Games to see what’s trending and to monetize their games using the company’s advertising technology. Games created on the Homa platform have been installed nearly 1 billion times so far, and the company has raised $65 million from investors including the founders of the company behind King. Candy Crush. homgames.com

Jump

To remove the downsides of being self-employed, Nioclas Fayon, Thibault Coulon and Maxime Bouchet launched Jump in 2021. The startup hires freelancers and temporary workers on long-term contracts in exchange for a monthly fee of 79 euros or 99 euros; Jump freelancers’ salaries are then deposited into their Jump bank accounts, and the company takes over their tax and pension management. If customers are late with their payments, Jump can provide them with an advance or guarantee if they want to apply for a loan or mortgage. The company raised €4 million in a 2021 funding round led by Deliveroo and Revolut investor Index Ventures. Join jump.com

pigment

Pigment is a Paris-based startup trying to challenge Excel. The company was founded in 2019 on the idea that businesses don’t have the tools they need to visualize company data and do financial planning. Instead, they ended up turning to Excel because the new tool simply couldn’t provide the same flexibility, says Regina Croda, director of marketing at Pigment. That’s why Pigment co-founders Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli created a new tool they describe as more intuitive and user-friendly, while also encouraging collaboration. For example, colleagues can leave comments to each other in spreadsheet cells. The company’s clients include Deliveroo and Blabla Car, and it has raised more than $100 million to date. gopigment.com