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👋 In this week's French Tech Wire:

🤖 VivaTech 2025 showcased a humanoid robot revolution in full swing, with 36 companies demonstrating AI-powered robots ranging from $9,000 Chinese models to sophisticated social companions that conversed with President Macron, proving that robots have evolved from tech curiosities to practical workforce solutions. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's declaration that "soon, everything that moves will be robotic" was backed by France's €30 million robotics investment and live demonstrations of robots performing everything from warehouse tasks to facility management, signaling that the long-promised age of widespread robotic deployment has finally arrived.

🤖 On Day 2 of VivaTech, Agility Robotics demonstrated how their humanoid robot Digit can understand voice commands through AI and sort colored t-shirts, showcasing a future where robots fill over a million unfilled U.S. jobs that humans are unwilling to take, rather than replacing existing workers. The company's Chief Business Officer Daniel Diez predicts this transformation will rival the scale of the iPhone or electricity, with cooperatively safe robots working alongside humans by 2026 and creating entirely new categories of "digital jobs" managing robot fleets.

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Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

🚀 Tech Talk 🚀

🇫🇷✊ La CGT entre en mode start-up. One of France's main unions, CGT, has officially launched a dedicated tech and startup chapter in Paris. While startups with 11+ employees are legally required to set up a works council (CSE), actual union presence has been rare, likely because most startup teams are under 30, and less than 3% of them are unionized nationally. A new CGT branch hopes to change that by targeting companies under the Syntec collective agreement, which includes most of France’s tech darlings. Among the hot topics: the return to the office post-COVID and rising concerns around psychosocial risks. Employees cite imposed hours, burnout, and management pressure, with many afraid to speak out publicly for fear of retaliation. | Les Echos

🏥💡 Station S: Nantes bets big on healthtech. After Station F, meet Station S: Nantes’ new flagship for health innovation. The freshly opened Gina building offers 5,500 m² to startups like Redeem Medical and Octopize, alongside research labs and major players like Tronico. It’s the first step in a larger vision: 30,000 m² of dedicated health innovation space, a future hospital, and even a 100,000 m² biopark to scale industrial activity. The goal is a full-blown European health district where startups, doctors, and researchers co-create the future of care. | Les Echos

🌪️📈 Descartes flirts with unicorn status. In a rare twist for 2025, a French startup’s valuation actually went up. Climate risk insurtech Descartes Underwriting just welcomed US VC giant Battery Ventures to its cap table. Co-founder of Guidewire (you know, the $20B company) Marcus Ryu is joining the board. While the amount remains hush-hush, this was a secondary deal, meaning some early investors cashed out to keep their own LPs happy. The result is a fresh valuation that is reportedly just shy of unicorn status at $900M. Not bad for a startup that rakes in $200M in premiums and has more offices in the U.S. than in France.| Les Echos

🩺💸 Nabla nabs $70M to decode doctors’ notes. French healthtech Nabla raised a healthy $70 million to fuel its AI medical assistant, already a hit with 85,000 doctors and 20 million consultations (mostly in the U.S.). Backed by HV Capital and Highland Europe, Nabla plans to focus on France, where it currently has less than 5% of its users. While rivals like Praxy.ai and Aalia.tech fight it out on features and pricing (hello €19 unlimited plan vs Nabla’s €69), Nabla’s multilingual assistant and U.S. momentum might give it the edge. | Les Echos

🤖🌾 Naïo Technologies in trouble: Agri-robotics pioneer enters receivership. Naïo Technologies, the Toulouse-based startup behind weeding and vineyard robots like Oz, Ted, and Orio, has been placed in judicial receivership. Despite producing over 450 robots and raising more than €50M since 2011, the company saw its revenue collapse from €6.5M in 2022 to €2.4M in 2024. Crushed by a wider agritech downturn, rising input costs, and a slumping farm equipment market, Naïo is now urgently seeking a buyer. Offers are due by June 27. It’s a sobering moment for a company once tipped to deploy 1,000 robots by 2025. | L’Usine Digitale

🇫🇷 🐥 New faces at France Digitale. France Digitale just gave its board a fresh coat of paint. Following a June 18 vote, six new members have joined the ranks to steer the ecosystem’s next battles (regulatory or otherwise). On the entrepreneur side: Jade Francine (WeMaintain), Julie Ranty (Pollen), and Xavier Zeitoun (Zenchef). Representing the VC crowd: Elina Berrebi (Revaia), Benoist Grossmann (Eurazeo), and Jérôme Masurel (50 Partners). Their mission is to champion startups and scaleups in France and in Brussels...ideally without too much paperwork. | LinkedIn

VivaTech 2025: Attack Of The Humanoid Robots

What was once the realm of futuristic speculation is fast becoming tangible: humanoid robots learning via AI, helpful service robots in public spaces, and autonomous machines tackling tasks from driving to caregiving.

The latest edition of VivaTech 2025 made it clear that the humanoid robotic revolution is here. While there have always been novelty robots drawing crowds on the exhibition floor at VivaTech, this year's edition demonstrated that the robotic conversation has become much more serious and urgent. There were at least 36 companies featuring robots on the exhibition floor this year.

As AI and hardware intersect, humanoid robots have moved beyond curiosities to practical deployment, even as the hype still makes it difficult to fully gauge progress.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang set the tone for the week with his opening keynote, which included a healthy dose of robotic demonstrations and enthusiasm.

“Soon, everything that moves will be robotic,” Huang said.

VivaTech 2025: AI, Robotics, Humans, And The End of Work As We Know It

At VivaTech 2025, a two-legged robot named Digit quietly sorted colored t-shirts into a basket, responding to voice commands delivered through a large language model. The demonstration might have seemed simple, but according to Daniel Diez, Chief Business Officer for Agility Robotics, it represented something far more significant: the beginning of a transformation.

On Day 2 of VivaTech, I hosted a fireside chat with Diez on the topic of "AI, Robotics, Humans, and the End of Work as We Know It?" Diez demonstrated Agility's Digit on stage as we discussed how AI-driven robots will impact the workforce.

"Is this the end of labor as we know it? Diez told me. "I think we're at the precipice of a fundamental change in the way we think about labor and how people are used or deployed to do work."

💸 Top Funding Deals 💸

📇 Company: Nabla
🔍 Description: An AI assistant that reduces practitioner stress by automating clinical documentation, improving patient care, and integrating seamlessly with EHRs
💻 Website: https://www.nabla.com/
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Series C
💰 Amount Raised: €63.64M
🏦 Investors: HV Capital, DST Global, Highland Europe, Tony Fadell, Cathay Innovation
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Alexandre Lebrun, Delphine Groll, Martin Raison
🗞️ News: Sifted

📇 Company: Animaj
🔍 Description: Builds a gateway between content creators and young audiences through animation
💻 Website: https://www.animaj.com
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Series C
💰 Amount Raised: €75M (equity and debt)
🏦 Investors: XAnge, Bpifrance, Daphni, Left Lane Capital, HarbourView Equity Partners, Marquee Ventures
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Gregory Dray, Sixte de Vauplane
🗞️ News: Maddyness, Bpifrance, Sifted

📇 Company: Pelico
🔍 Description: AI-powered operations management platform helping industrial manufacturers resolve disruptions, anticipate bottlenecks, and improve operational performance in real time.
💻 Website: https://www.pelico.ai/
📍 HQ City: Paris + Miami
🧗 Round: Series B
💰 Amount Raised: $40M (~€37M)
🏦 Investors: General Catalyst, 83North, Serena Capital
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Tarik Benabdallah, Mamoun Alaoui, Jonathan Hickson
🗞️ News: Maddyness

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