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Headlines

🐱 Mistral AI has launched its latest generative-AI tool: Le Chat Enterprise. The assistant plugs into a company’s SharePoint drives, Google Workspace, calendars, and email, then drafts weekly digests and spins up mini-agents on demand. Crucially for security-conscious European buyers, it can run on-prem, in a private cloud, or on any hyperscaler, a nod to Mistral's data-sovereignty focus. Just as notable, it is powered by the brand-new Medium 3 model, which Mistral says delivers near-flagship performance at one-eighth the price.

The release came as CEO Arthur Mensch told reporters that revenue has tripled in just 100 days thanks to eager corporate adopters from Paris to Palo Alto. That stacks on top of roughly €30 million in annual recurring revenue clocked in 2024, nudging the two-year-old startup toward a nine-digit run-rate.

Early marquee customers include BNP Paribas, Axa, and shipping giant CMA CGM (which alone pledged €100 million over five years). Beyond the big names, Medium 3’s cut-rate token pricing and plug-and-play fine-tuning mean even mid-sized firms can afford a tailored large-language took, a big reason that Mensch said Mistral is growing fast. The launch also dovetails with Mistral’s plan to build its own French data-center campus, trimming dependence on American clouds and adding another sovereignty selling point.

Still, open models remain a double-edged sword. According to a new safety audit by U.S. startup Enkrypt AI, Mistral’s multimodal models, Pixtral 12B and Pixtral Large, were up to 60 times more likely than rivals to generate child-sexual-exploitation content and 40 times more likely to hand out recipes for chemical or nuclear nastiness. In one chilling metric, 84 percent of prompts designed to coax child-exploitation material succeeded, and 98 percent of CBRN prompts passed unfiltered. Mistral stated that it has “zero tolerance” for such abuse, is partnering with an NGO to examine the results in detail. | Sifted, Maddyness, Reuters, Mistral

🤝 Black Mirror just became a little less speculative fiction thanks to the launch of Gigi, a new AI-powered platform that scrapes all of your social profiles and internet presence to analyze you and find compatible matches for business, networking, and dating. Though for the moment, it's just dating.

If that sounds a little unnerving, if not downright creepy, well, Gigi's founder Clara Gold doesn't seem to be shying away from that vibe based on her LinkedIn post announcing the release:

"She scraped your online life, psychoanalyzed you, and now she’s telling you who you should actually meet. You didn’t sign up. You already have a profile. You already have a ranking. You can run a vibe check on anyone. People you like. People you hate. No app. No feed. Just the AI who knows everyone. Obviously, we started with you: the tech crowd. Because let’s be honest, you all secretly want to match with each other anyway."

The site's messaging is the same:

According to its LinkedIn page, the company has raised $4.5 million in Seed money. Also, it doubles down on that Black Mirror vibe: "Gigi is the AI who knows everyone. She knows exactly who you should meet. Just call Gigi, she'll handle it. Gigi is backed by Sequoia, OpenAI, and Monashees... which makes her an expensive b****."

🇫🇷✊ Frenchtechland got an unexpected jolt with the announcement on Thursday that one of its own will effectively be running OpenAI. Which one may argue is one of the world's most influential tech companies, if not (yet) the largest. Announced via whatever people now call tweets, CEO Sam Altman revealed that Fidji Simo had been appointed its first-ever CEO of Applications. Simo is currently CEO of Instacart, but will gradually transition away from that job to the new post at OpenAI. | The French Tech Journal

🧬 Owkin has rolled out K Navigator, an agentic AI “co-pilot” to turbo-charge biomedical research workflows. The single natural-language interface pulls insights from 19 public biomedical databases and 26.5 million PubMed papers, turning chores like spatial-transcriptomics plotting from three days to a minute and delivering an average 20-fold productivity lift. Early users also gain free beta access to MOSAIC Window, a 60-patient slice of the world’s largest spatial omics oncology dataset, and the system already beats frontier LLMs such as OpenAI o3 on the tricky “oncogenic-signature” benchmark. Owkin is offering six months of no-cost access to academic labs, while promising K Pro later this year—a beefed-up version aimed at pharma-grade data exploration, drug discovery, and development. By fusing multimodal data analytics with autonomous agents, the company says K Navigator is a stepping-stone toward its long-term quest for “Biological Artificial Super-Intelligence,” bringing faster, deeper insight to the hunt for new therapies. | Usine Digitale

🇷🇺🇫🇷 France has identified nearly 80 Russian-led disinformation campaigns between August 2023 and March 2025, primarily targeting Ukraine and its allies, including France. The "Storm-1516" operation, as reported by the French agency Viginum, utilized artificial intelligence and paid operators to disseminate anti-Ukrainian narratives, posing a significant threat to Europe's digital discourse. In response, France summoned the Russian ambassador, condemning the misuse of diplomatic channels for manipulation and intimidation. The French foreign ministry highlighted that Russia's actions are part of a broader strategy of hybrid warfare aimed at destabilizing European countries through cyberattacks and disinformation. | France 24

Other Headlines

Top French chefs warm to AI in the kitchen | At the annual gathering of France's finest chefs for the Michelin Guide awards this year, the talk was not only about whose restaurants had gained or lost a star. "Everyone's discussing AI. I was at a table of 12 other chefs and it was the main thing we talked about," Matan Zaken, who runs the one-star Nhome restaurant in Paris, told AFP at the event at the end of March. | AFP

ICYMI

🗞️ Alan Goes All-In on AI | Six months after announcing a Series F funding round of €173 million at a €4 billion valuation, the French insurtech is accelerating its embrace of AI to transform its operations and products. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ 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

🗣️ Is France Losing Its AI Funding Mojo?

Despite government initiatives and the Paris Summit, France's AI startup ecosystem is struggling to secure funding in 2025, raising just $372 million so far compared to $2.8 billion in 2024. With fewer big rounds and declining deal volume, France lags behind the UK and Germany in AI investment.

AI Funding News

📇 Company: Kalent
🔍 Description: AI-powered tool streamlining talent acquisition processes for companies.
💻 Website: http://kalent.ai
📍 HQ City: Nantes, France
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €1M
🏦 Investors: Kima Ventures
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Cedric Tournay
🗞️ News: FrenchWeb

📇 Company: Raidium
🔍 Description: Radiology foundation model leveraging GPT technology for precision medicine, designed to assist radiologists with enhanced image analysis and diagnostic insights.
💻 Website: https://raidium.eu
📍 HQ City: Roubaix, France
🧗 Round: Early VC
💰 Amount Raised: Not disclosed
🏦 Investors: Debiopharm Group
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Paul Herent, Pierre Manceron
🗞️ News: PR

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, our ecosystem guests, and VCs 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

📆 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

📆 AI Tinkerers - Paris Meetup featuring PhotoRoom | May 15th | It’s AI Tinkerers, not AI enthusiasts. We screen attendance to active builders with a shared level of expertise to create a collaborative environment ideal for early-stage discovery and innovation. Come and meet inspiring people tinkering on AI, grab a drink and a bite, and hear 5-minute demos on what a selected few are working on with LLMs, GenAI or something you haven’t even considered. | Register

📆 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

📆 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐬 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐀𝐈 𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 | June 12 | 🚨 Want to 𝐥𝐚𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐀𝐈 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 in front of Europe's sharpest AI minds? 🧠 150 AI founders, CTOs, AI engineers, researchers & VCs. 🚀 On 𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟏𝟐, we're turning the lights on at Doctolib’s HQ in Paris, and the brightest GenAI builders will take the stage. | Request to join

📆 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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