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Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand
Headlines
🗞️ Where AI dies: Europe’s AI progress ‘insufficient’ to compete with US & China, says report | "A recent report by France’s Parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technological Assessment (OPECST) has raised concerns about Europe’s ability to compete with the US and China in the artificial intelligence (AI) race. The study paints a sobering picture of Europe’s lagging progress, highlighting the challenges in achieving digital sovereignty and the need for greater investment in AI innovation." | FirstPost
🗞️ Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch ranks 28th on the Politico list of most influential people in Europe | "At a time when many assume that Europe has already lost the global artificial intelligence race, 32-year-old Arthur Mensch is on a mission to prove them wrong." | Politico
Interviews
🗣️ Teaching Physics to AI: How Aqemia Wants To Revolutionize Drug Discovery
In the rapidly advancing world of AI-driven drug discovery, French company Aqemia is trying to chart a unique path by teaching physics to artificial intelligence.
Last week, the company announced a €30 million funding round led by Cathay Innovation, bringing its total funding to over $100 million - a milestone that underscores growing confidence in its innovative approach to pharmaceutical research.
What sets Aqemia apart in the crowded field of AI drug discovery is its novel approach. Rather than training its AI on vast databases of existing molecules, the company teaches its generative AI theoretical physics principles. This allows it to predict how potential drug molecules will interact with disease targets at the atomic level, without needing experimental data as a starting point.
According to CEO and Co-Founder Maximilien Levesque, this approach allows the company to innovate more freely, creating entirely new molecules rather than variations on existing ones.
"We do not put a lot of data into a Gen AI that will then invent molecules that look like what it's been trained on," Levesque said. "Instead, we teach atomic scale physics to GenAI."
🗣️ Seed Of The Week: Yampa
Yampa raised a €3 million Seed Round to develop autonomous AI agents for customer service operations. Its AI agents are designed to handle unique situations across multiple communication channels – including phone calls, emails, and chat – in all common languages. The system can understand each client's specific context, analyze their requests, and act autonomously to resolve issues. When faced with particularly complex situations, the agents can seamlessly escalate to human customer service teams.
"Our conviction was that in the future, to have truly efficient customer support, both for companies and clients, AI agents will play a major role," said CEO and co-founder Marin Huet. "The key is not just to propose chatbots or call bots that are purely conversational. Customer support is complex and needs agents that can gather information, make decisions, and take actions to solve end-to-end processes."
AI Funding News
📇 Company: Syroco
🔍 Description: Syroco EfficientShip is a software platform that builds digital twins of ships by leveraging physics modeling, data, and AI.
💻 Website: https://syro.co
📍 HQ City: Marseille
🧗 Round: Series A
💰 Amount Raised: €7.50M
🏦 Investors: Seventure Partners; Alter Equity
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Florent Boutellier; Bertrand Diard; Yves de Montcheuil; Olivier Taillard
🗞️ News: https://www.bunkerspot.com/europe/63837-syroco-series-a-funding-round-alter-equity-seventure-partners
📇 Company: Deeplife
🔍 Description: GenAI drug discovery platform
💻 Website: http://deeplife.co
📍 HQ City: Vernon
🧗 Round: Series A
💰 Amount Raised: €9.09M
🏦 Investors: Beiersdorf; Relyens; YZR Capital; Groupe Prunay
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Jonathan Baptista; Jean-Baptiste Morlot
🗞️ News: https://sifted.eu/articles/deeplife-10m-series-a-news
📇 Company: DashBook
🔍 Description: AI platform transforming online content into books.
💻 Website: https://dashbook.fr/
📍 HQ City: Paris and Barcelona
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €3M (including €1M debt)
🏦 Investors: Seventure Partners; Bpifrance (debt)
👨💼👩💼 Founders: David Botvinik and David Poirson
🗞️ News: https://www.maddyness.com/2024/12/10/dashbook-veut-devenir-la-maison-dedition-de-reference-pour-les-createurs-de-contenus/
📇 Company: Artifeel
🔍 Description: The design and commercialization of intelligent security and monitoring systems based on in-vehicle AI and IoT technologies.
💻 Website: https://artifeel.com
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €1.2M
🏦 Investors: Graines de Boss; Side Angels; Welikeangels
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Alain Staron
🗞️ News: https://artifeel.com/levee-de-fonds-2024/
📇 Company: Yampa
🔍 Description: Reinventing customer service standards with autonomous AI agents, available 24/7, to manage end-to-end customer processes across multiple communication channels.
💻 Website: https://yampa.ai
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €3M
🏦 Investors: Partech; Business Angels, including Arthur Waller (Co-founder of Pennylane) and Guillaume Desloges (Co-founder of Alma); Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) experts
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Marin Huet; Baptiste Saintot; Patrice Mazoyer
🗞️ News: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/12/hello-can-i-help-you-yampas-ai-customer-service-is-ready-to-turn-heads-with-new-funding/
📇 Company: Aqemia
🔍 Description: A next-gen pharma tech company using AI to generate one of the world’s fastest-growing drug discovery pipelines.
💻 Website: http://www.aqemia.com/
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Early VC
💰 Amount Raised: €35.98M
🏦 Investors: Elaia Partners; Bpifrance; Eurazeo; Cathay Innovation; Wendel
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Emmanuelle Martiano Rolland; Maximilien Levesque
🗞️ News: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/10/aqemia-raises-38m-to-find-new-drugs-by-meshing-theoretical-physics-with-genai/
Events
📆 Paris Open Source AI Summit, by Linagora | December 19, 2024 | Information
📆 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit | February 10-11, 2025 | Heads of State and Government, leaders of international organizations, CEOs of small and large companies, representatives of academia, non-governmental organizations, artists, and members of civil society will gather in Paris to discuss the critical policy issues surrounding AI. | Information
📆 France Digitale's AI Day 2025 | February 11, 2025 | Paris will be the AI capital of the world (at least for a week) during the AI Action Summit. With our AI Day — the official business side event of the Summit — seize this moment to meet and learn about the best in AI innovation made in Europe. | Information
📆 World AI Cannes Festival | February 13 -15, 2025 | For 3 days, the prestigious Palais des Festival of Cannes will become the world capital of AI, where decision-makers and AI innovators meet, where the most promising innovations and technologies get into the spotlight, where those who are currently building the world’s most game-changing AI strategies and use-cases will be on stages. | Registration
📆 RAISE Summit 2025 | July 8-9, 2025 | RAISE Summit is the premier event for professionals seeking to disrupt, build, and connect in the AI landscape. This summit is the ultimate destination to validate AI strategies through real-world use cases, define a winning AI playbook, and find the right partners to deliver cutting-edge solutions. | Register
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