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Headlines

🗞️ France has identified data centers as a fundamental part of its AI competition strategy. Investors are responding by driving a boom in data center construction.

According to a new report, the French data center market, valued at U$3.42 billion in 2024, is projected to reach $6.40 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 11.01%. "France Data Center Market - Investment Analysis & Growth Opportunities 2025-2030" notes that growth is being fueled by government initiatives like tax credits for renewable energy projects and a $52 billion AI data center investment agreement with the UAE. New technologies such as liquid cooling are being rapidly adopted, with companies like DATA4 and OVHcloud partnering to improve energy efficiency. Major players like Digital Realty, Equinix, and NTT DATA are expanding their footprint, alongside 10 new entrants, including CloudHQ, Mistral AI, and OPCORE, intensifying market competition.

Currently, France hosts 146 existing and 21 upcoming third-party data center facilities across over 40 cities. Overall, the report says, the French data center landscape is entering a high-growth phase, driven by sustainability initiatives, strategic partnerships, and rising demand for AI and cloud services. | ResearchAndMarkets

🗞️ Pierre Valade, known for co-founding the Sunrise calendar app acquired by Microsoft in 2015, has unveiled his latest venture: WorkflowAI. This startup aims to revolutionize productivity tools by integrating artificial intelligence into workflow management. WorkflowAI seeks to automate routine tasks and streamline operations, drawing from Valade's experience in creating user-centric applications. The initiative reflects Valade's continued commitment to enhancing digital productivity through innovative solutions. | Les Echos, LinkedIn

🗞️ France's data and privacy regulatory authority – Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) – has issued detailed recommendations for AI projects in public services, emphasizing the need for meaningful human oversight to avoid fully automated decisions, especially in sensitive contexts like employment assistance. It stresses the importance of strict data minimization, recommending careful selection and anonymization or pseudonymization of personal data, and highlights the risks of bias and discrimination, urging preventive audits and safeguards. Additionally, CNIL clarified that data used for real-time operational decisions cannot be considered purely statistical and must comply with GDPR protections. Overall, the report urges developers to integrate ethical and privacy-by-design principles from the earliest stages of AI deployment in the public sector. | CNIL

🗞️ To boost AI projects in the French legal sector, lawyers, legal departments, and legaltech companies have launched the "Data Legal Space," a sovereign European data space designed to enable the secure sharing of public and private data. The goal is to create a trusted framework to support the development of legal AI agents while protecting and enhancing the value of the data. Each participant will be able to share anonymized data under defined access conditions. The project, still in its funding phase, aims to capture 10% of the market as an alternative to American tech giants. | L'Usine Digitale

🗞️ OpenAI’s ChatGPT search feature has rapidly expanded in Europe, reaching about 41.3 million average monthly active users by March 2025, up from 11.2 million six months earlier. This growth, reported to comply with the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), could soon classify ChatGPT as a "very large" platform subject to stricter regulations. Despite its gains, ChatGPT search still trails far behind Google and faces criticisms over reliability, with studies highlighting notable inaccuracies in search results. Noncompliance with DSA rules could expose OpenAI to hefty fines or service suspension in Europe. | TechCrunch

🗞️ More than 5,000 communes across France are now using AI-assisted systems and cameras to identify residents who improperly sort their rubbish, aiming to improve recycling rates and reduce costs. Households found at fault first receive a warning, with subsequent offenses leading to €135 fines. Cities like Reims use AI to analyze waste in real-time, identifying sorting errors and helping guide education campaigns to improve compliance. This initiative builds on broader efforts by French communes to tackle illegal dumping and optimize waste management practices. | The Connexion

🗞️ Marly Garnreiter, a 27-year-old woman from Paris, experienced persistent night sweats and itchy skin, which she initially attributed to anxiety and grief after her father’s death. When traditional medical tests came back normal, she entered her symptoms into ChatGPT, which suggested she might have blood cancer — a warning she dismissed at the time. Months later, after new symptoms like chest pain and extreme fatigue appeared, doctors discovered a large mass in her lung and diagnosed her with Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. Remarkably, ChatGPT had predicted her diagnosis nearly a year before medical professionals confirmed it. | People

ICYMI

🗞️ How Delos Is Building an AI Operating System for Business | CEO Pierre de la Grand'rive: "Our ambition is to offer generative AI that is truly useful to employees." | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ FlexAI: Pioneering Universal AI Compute Infrastructure | Modern AI workloads were being forced to run on computing architectures designed decades ago. FlexAI wants to create a faster, more flexible system that enables rapid scaling. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ Descartes Underwriting: Doubling Down On Climate Risk As Insurance Industry Retreats | Chief Science Officer Kévin Dedieu: "AI represents between 2-5% of our tech investments. Next year, we’re increasing that by 10%, with more resources dedicated to AI and using it for our core models. The cost of AI is relatively low, but its impact is huge.” | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ Growl's AI Boxing Bag Delivers A Knockout Fitness Experience | A pair of French entrepreneurs in Texas have launched Growl, a connected fitness startup that reimagines the traditional boxing bag as an AI-powered, interactive home coach. As the company moves towards commercialization, CEO and co-founder Léo Desrumaux explains the vision. | The French Tech Journal

🗣️ Alan Goes All-In on AI

Over the past year, French insurtech unicorn Alan has made it clear that its future would be built around AI.

Founded in 2016, the company's AI investments have driven remarkable growth, created new efficiencies, and enabled new products. The vision, as explained by CEO and co-founder Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, is to turn health insurance into a digital, AI-powered health companion. AI is no longer just a nice-to-have at Alan; it is at the very core of how the company operates, scales, and reshapes health care for its 400,000+ members.

At Alan's Spring Keynote earlier this month, the company rolled out its latest initiatives, including AI-driven features like its gamified “Alan Play” experience and updates to its “Mo” virtual health assistant.

As business leaders and investors debate whether AI can deliver real business advances to justify the immense hype, Alan appears determined to serve as a poster child for the ways it can reinvent products, services, customer support, and internal operations.

"To try to transform a mandatory expense into a company's most valuable investment, the health of its teams," Samuelian-Werve said. "For years, we have been trying to innovate every day in this direction."

AI Funding News

📇 Company: Didomi
🔍 Description: Best platform for managing data privacy compliance.
💻 Website: http://didomi.io
📍 HQ City: Paris, France
🧗 Round: Growth Equity VC – used to acquire server-side tagging platform Addingwell.
💰 Amount Raised: €72 million
🏦 Investors: Marlin Equity Partners
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Romain Gauthier, Raphaël Boukris, Jawad Stouli
🗞️ News: Maddyness, PR

📇 Company: CleanMob
🔍 Description: Developer of a fleet management platform leveraging proprietary virtual sensor technology to enhance automotive telematics without physical devices, optimizing energy usage, maintenance, and CO2 emissions.
💻 Website: https://www.cleanmob.eu
📍 HQ City: Paris, France
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €1.3 million
🏦 Investors: Bpifrance, 212Founders by CDG Invest, MNF Ventures, Tremplin Capital, Business Angels
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Salah El Hajji, Khalil El Hajji

Announcements

SISTA AI | A program dedicated to accelerating the creation and growth of startups founded by women in AI. Women founders in tech are one of the key drivers of innovation, growth, and employment across Europe. | Deadline: June 17 | Apply

Emerging AI: Pitch competition France Regionals | Join HubSpot for Startups, and our ecosystem guests, VC in this exciting global competition dedicated to discovering new AI startups. We hope to find and support the next great innovation in AI and offer a global platform to the best founders of France. The founder/winner of France will have the opportunity to present at our world final in June and win a cash prize of $6000, as well as $100,000 in free software. | Deadline: May 22 | Apply

Google Startup Perks program | We're excited to launch our new Startup Perks program, offering exclusive benefits and discounts from 20+ leading AI and tech companies within the Google Cloud ecosystem. | More information

Events

☀️ Sponsors' events ☀️

📆 Viva Technology | June 11 - 14 | VivaTech is Europe's biggest startup and tech event. The ninth edition is taking place in Paris, at the Expo Porte de Versailles venue. VivaTech contributes to the acceleration of innovation by connecting startups, technology leaders, large companies, and investors addressing the world's greatest challenges. | Buy Tickets

The Calendar

📆 The World Through AI | April 11 - September 25 | The exhibition The World Through AI presents a selection of works created between 2016 and today, many of them previously unseen, which raise the question of how we experience the world “according to AI” or “through the prism of AI”. Specially designed for the Jeu de Paume, the exhibition reflects the fundamental distinction between “analytical AI” (which includes computer vision and facial recognition systems) and “generative AI”. Time capsules, designed as cabinets of curiosities, link the present to the past, placing current transformations in a historical perspective. | Information

📆 MKIA 25 | April 29 | The Maddy Keynote, organized by Maddyness, announces its special edition: the MKIA, the event that transforms the broad guidelines on AI into concrete initiatives for the economic leaders of tomorrow. Far from abstract tech-symbol discourse, MKIA deciphers AI in a concrete and educational way through round tables, keynotes, case studies, and a zone for startups. It enables all actors – start-ups, corporations, investors, and institutions – to take ownership of the challenges and opportunities of its adoption. | Register

📆 HealthAI Cocktail Hour | Cathay, AWS and Sanofi are delighted to invite you for a Cocktail Hour, featuring thought leaders in the healthcare industry and innovators for an evening of inspiring conversations with fellows. | Register

📆 Zero to Product Buildathon à Paris | Operators & Friends is teaming up with Lovable, Motier Ventures, OpenAI, Huggingface, and Lightspeed Ventures to host a laid-back evening for you to build and launch products in <30 minutes. ​Join 100 builders to create products with Lovable in the heart of Paris 🇫🇷 | Apply

📆 GOSIM AI Paris 2025 | May 6-7 | The Global Open-Source Innovation Meetup will spotlight the latest advancements in 6 Conference Tracks: AI Model, AI Infra, AI Apps, Embodied AI, AI for Science, and Global Open-Source AI Collaboration, driving significant progress in global open-source AI collaboration. A highlight of the event is the introduction of GOSIM AI Spotlight, a global initiative to select 10 outstanding open-source AI projects for showcase and technical exchange, further accelerating AI innovation. | Registration

📆 Revolution Summit 2025 | May 13 | In the era of the fourth anthropological and industrial revolution driven by the cloud, data, and AI, our ambition is to develop systemic thinking to address the economic, academic, and technological challenges of tomorrow. | Registration

📆 Google Cloud Summit France 2025 | May 22 | Join the annual Google Cloud event to discover the latest technological innovations in generative AI, security, application development, collaboration, and more. | Register

📆 {Tech: Paris} AI Hackathon #1 | May 24 | Join us for the first-ever {Tech: Europe} AI Hackathon in Paris — a full weekend dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what's possible with artificial intelligence. Whether you're a seasoned builder or just getting started, this is your chance to connect, create, and compete alongside Europe's top talent. | Register

📆 The Paris AI Conference 2025 | June 16 | The Paris AI Conference 2025 gathers 250 of France's AI Experts, Founders, Investors, and Enthusiasts, for an evening of content and networking. This event is hosted by Startup Network Europe. | Register

📆 Stripe Tour Paris | June 17 | Join us for Stripe Tour, our global roadshow that brings together business leaders in major cities to discuss the most important trends in payments and financial technology. | Register

📆 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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