Inside this week's edition:

👀 Deep Dive: French start-ups navigate choppy waters as VC funding plummets 24% while employment surges 11.5%. The 2025 Barometer from France Digitale and EY reveals an ecosystem transitioning from growth-at-all-costs to sustainable profitability amid mounting political and economic headwinds.

👀 Deep Dive: Kyron.bio is developing a platform to tackle a hidden problem in antibody drug design: the variability in how sugar molecules (glycans) attach to therapeutic proteins, which can trigger immune rejection. This promises safer, longer-lasting biologics by reducing immunogenicity and increasing consistency of drug performance. Dr. Emilia McLaughlin, Kyron.bio’s CEO and co-founder, breaks down the science and the vision driving this Deep Tech startup.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

Tech Talk

🦄 🇫🇷 Cocorico squared: Mistral AI just became France’s very first decacorn, hitting a sky-high valuation of nearly $14B after raising €1.7B in a Series C round. The Paris-based AI darling, only two years old, bagged a whopping €1.3B from Dutch semiconductor titan ASML. Yes, the same company that makes those bus-sized lithography machines used to print the chips inside your phone, car, and fighter jet. The deal signals a rare show of European tech solidarity, with ASML betting Mistral can turbocharge its own AI capabilities while giving Brussels a poster child for “digital sovereignty.” Sure, across the Atlantic, OpenAI and Anthropic are raising sums ten times bigger. But Europe is playing a different game: capital-efficient, fiercely independent, and (at least for now) proudly homegrown....And yes, the story has been absolutely everywhere - except, as Mike Butcher cheekily pointed out, on TechCrunch 😉 (check out his LinkedIn post here, Les Echos, FT, France 24

🔬✨ From Grenoble with lasers: Scintil Photonics has raised a €50M Series B to crank up production of its silicon photonics chips. The CEA-Leti spin-out landed fresh backing from Yotta, NGP Capital, BNP Paribas, and yes, Nvidia, because apparently Jensen Huang can’t resist a bit of French photonics 😜. Scintil’s “Ship” platform integrates lasers, modulators, and photodiodes on a single chip, promising ultrafast (up to a terabit per second), low-energy data transfer for data centers, HPC, and AI. Its flagship “Leaf Light” laser source is set to scale as the startup expands from Grenoble to the US. The target markets: Data centers, HPC, 5G, and the booming AI compute infrastructure, where Nvidia and AMD are racing to embed photonics at the chip level. | Maddyness, Usine Digitale

🤑💰 Quadrille Capital goes big on tech. Paris + San Francisco-based Quadrille Capital has just raised €500M across three funds to supercharge investments in European and US tech. That includes €285M for direct investments (already backing AI startup Sanas, gaming studio Homa, and fintech firm Wisetack), €70M for their primary fund, and €150M for the secondary fund — more than triple its first vintage. With €1.8B now under management, Quadrille is flexing its multi-strategy, cross‑Atlantic muscle, covering software, AI, healthcare, and more. CEO Jérôme Chevalier calls it a vote of confidence in the firm’s “pioneering and cross-functional strategic vision.” Translation: they’re playing the long game, and Europe + US tech better watch out. | Maddyness, TechEu

🤝 🇩🇪 Mayday takes a Rhine break. Five years after its 2020 founding in Paris, French AI knowledge-management startup Mayday has been snapped up by German CX giant USU. The deal keeps Mayday’s 50-strong team intact while giving its solutions a transnational boost. Mayday, already powering companies like Fnac-Darty, La Poste, Doctolib, and Qonto, specializes in turning messy customer-service knowledge into actionable AI insights. With USU on board, the vision is clear: “No KM, no AI.” Together, they aim to build a European CX powerhouse, blending automation, intuitive UX, and lightning-fast AI responses. In short, your call center just got smarter - and now it speaks fluent German. |Maddyness, BusinessWire

🦄 🎪 FDDay 2025: the French Tech circus is back! Next Wednesday, September 17th, the French startup scene descends on the Musée des Arts Forains for the annual France Digitale Day. Doors open at 8:30 am, and yes, coffee will be needed — it’s going to be jam‑packed. Key speakers include Maya Noël (France Digitale), Roxanne Varza (Station F), Alexia Laroche‑Joubert (Banijay), and a mix of top VCs and founders. On the agenda: C‑Level tracks, corporate-startup matchmaking, a spotlight on NoCode/low‑code tools, Talent Awards, and the CES Tech Trends morning session that links France’s startup buzz to the world stage. Whether you’re hunting funding, partnerships, or just the best croissants in Paris, FDDay promises a full day of French Tech pomp, play, and (slightly nerdy) glory. Team FTJ will obviously be there too! 😉 Check out the Programme.

Inside Kyron.bio’s Bold Bet to Rewrite the Rules of Antibody Drug Design

For all the excitement around next-generation antibody therapies, a surprisingly mundane biological process is proving to be a critical bottleneck: How sugar molecules are arranged on the surface of therapeutic proteins.

Paris-based Kyron.bio is betting that solving this quiet but consequential problem could unlock a new class of safer, longer-lasting biologic drugs.

The biotech startup raised €5.5 million in seed funding in May this year to scale its glyco-engineering platform, a technology that allows unprecedented control over glycans, the complex sugar structures that decorate therapeutic antibodies. The round was led by HCVC, with participation from Verve Ventures, Entrepreneur First, Saras Capital, and several business angels. The raise also coincides with the launch of Kyron’s EIC Transition project, supported by the European Innovation Council.

Glycosylation is the cellular process of attaching sugars to proteins. While it might sound esoteric, its effects are far-reaching. Glycans influence how a drug behaves in the body, how long it lasts in circulation, and critically, whether the immune system flags it as a threat.

For many antibody drugs, that flag can mean failure.

French Start-ups Navigate Turbulence as Growth Slows Despite Resilient Job Creation

France's start-up ecosystem is showing remarkable resilience in the face of mounting economic and political headwinds, but the golden age of explosive growth appears to be cooling, according to the latest barometer from France Digitale and EY.

The numbers tell a tale of two realities.

On one hand, French start-ups generated €11.5 billion in revenue during 2024, marking a solid 16% increase from the previous year. The ecosystem now employs 1.45 million people and has created an impressive 150,000 new jobs over the past year.

Yet scratch beneath the surface, and signs of strain emerge everywhere.

Emmanuelle Ratsimialavahoaka, Partner at EY & Associates, identifies the core struggles: "Faced with the economic slowdown and declining household consumption, raising funds and finding clients remain the primary challenges that start-ups say they must overcome in the coming months."

💸 Top Funding Deals 💸

📇 Company: Mistral AI
🔍 Description: Developing the best generative AI models
💻 Website: mistral.ai
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Series C
💰 Amount Raised: €1,818.18M
🏦 Investors: Index Ventures; Lightspeed Venture Partners; General Catalyst; ASML; Bpifrance; Andreessen Horowitz; DST Global; Nvidia
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Guillaume Lample; Timothée Lacroix; Arthur Mensch
🗞️ News: Reuters

📇 Company: Heetch
🔍 Description: Ride-sharing app targeted at late-night transportation seekers in France
💻 Website: heetch.com
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Series B
💰 Amount Raised: €58.36M
🏦 Investors: Kima Ventures; Aster Capital
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Mathieu Jacob; Nicolas Lapomarda; Aylic Petit
🗞️ News: Heetch wants to strengthen its position in the ride-sharing market with a focus on late-night urban mobility. The company will use the funds to expand across France and French-speaking Africa, improve its technology platform, and recruit new drivers to meet growing demand. The strategy is to differentiate itself from larger rivals by targeting underserved night-time riders and building a loyal community of drivers and passengers. | Cathay Capital, Medium

📇 Company: Scintil Photonics
🔍 Description: A fabless company that develops silicon photonic integrated circuits by combining Silicon and Indium Phosphide materials through wafer-scale bonding
💻 Website: scintil-photonics.com
📍 HQ City: Grenoble
🧗 Round: Series B
💰 Amount Raised: €50.00M
🏦 Investors: Bpifrance; Innovacom; Nvidia; Bosch Ventures; NGP Capital; Applied Ventures; Supernova Invest; BNP Paribas Développement; Yotta Capital Partners
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Sylvie Menezo; Pascal Langlois
🗞️ News: The funding will be used to ramp up production of its LEAF Light™ integrated photonics chip for AI data centers. The company will use the capital to accelerate manufacturing, expand globally—particularly in the U.S.—and grow its workforce. Its SHIP™ platform aims to deliver more energy-efficient, high-density optical systems that cut costs and carbon footprints for hyperscale AI infrastructure. | PR

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