
🤖 La Machine #21: AI That Packs A Punch 🤖
Inside: Growl hopes its AI Boxing Bag will be a hit; the French army hops on the AI bandwagon; more AI events than you can shake a stick at.
La Machine tells you what you need to know about an ecosystem that is emerging as a global AI hub. This includes the latest headlines, product launches, company launches, and funding rounds.
Inside: Growl hopes its AI Boxing Bag will be a hit; the French army hops on the AI bandwagon; more AI events than you can shake a stick at.
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.
Artificial intelligence is advancing at an unprecedented pace, reshaping industries, economies, and global power structures. But while AI models and applications are evolving rapidly, the infrastructure that powers them is struggling to keep up, especially in Europe. The reality is stark: Europe is falling behind in AI-ready infrastructure. Unlike the
U.S. Startups are reaching $100M ARR with less than 50 employees. French startups risk being squeezed if they don’t adapt.
Inside: A look at the future of AI and Video with Aive; Paris gets a fancy new AI center.
CEO Olivier Reynaud: "We created an AI product years before the current AI wave. We are an enterprise-ready solution and not something in the lab."
Exclusively for Paid Subscribers: The latest filings for new AI-related companies in France, plus AI startups selected for incubators and accelerators.
Inside: How Metroscope is optimizing power plants with AI; Mistral AI's Le Chat purrs; and funding news for AI startups Genial, Ochy, Spore, and 73 Strings.
CEO Aurélien Schwartz: “We’re at the beginning of a massive industrial transformation. AI is no longer optional—it’s the backbone of a smarter, more resilient energy grid.”
Inside: The AI Summit for Action is over. But we have one final recap. Plus: Mistral AI says it's open for business. Will it be enough to claim a place on the global stage?
CEO Arthur Mensch: "Our goal is to be a global market leader." France's Great LLM Hope announced a flood of business deals in the face of mounting skepticism that it can compete against rivals such as OpenAI and DeepSeek.
CEO Cécile Villette: “We’re helping the industry become future-proof.”
The two-day summit saw lots of biz announcements, but no consensus on an AI statement. The mood was decidedly more buoyant at the Business Day gathering at Station F.
Can a €109bn investment package turbo-charge France's AI ambitions? Can AI diplomats learn to sing from the same gospel hymn?
Macron: "This summit is not just the announcement of investments in France. It's a wake-up call for our European strategy."
"We need to stop thinking about the decisions made about AI as something that technology company leaders do. We have to take back the control of those decisions."