European AI startups raised $8 billion in 2024
In just a few days, France will Artificial Intelligence Action TOPWith heads of state who flows to Paris to meet global technical leaders. They will most likely announce some large investments and diplomatic similarities aimed at safety or the environmental impact of artificial intelligence.
Prior to the top, early phase VC Firm Galion.exeGrowth Investment Firm Revaiaand consultancy Chausson Partners worked together to Frans AI reportHe looks at the current trends in the technical ecosystem.
Although all eyes are currently on the US and China, with OpenAI who wants to collect dozens of billions of dollars and deep chat that attracts everyone’s attention, there has also been a flowering in AI startups in Europe. In 2024 alone, AI companies represented around 20% of all VC financing in the region.
In total, this represents around $ 8 billion in financing for AI startups in 2024. That metric will most likely grow rapidly, because AI startups are still relatively young. Seventy percent of the capital collected by AI Startups in 2024 was for a seed to become B round.
European countries that tend to attract VC financing in general have also become the most important AI investment hubs, whereby the UK leads the group, France and Germany according to the example and the northerns that bump over demographic weight. Here is the breakdown from 2020 to 2024:
Interestingly, as AI companies become larger, they tend to attract international investors, with American VC companies that are good for about 50% of the money invested in AI companies in the C -round series and later.
In France more specifically, there are “more than 750 startups that have created 35,000 jobs and operate in all areas that transform current society,” said Minister for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies that Clara Chappaz said at a press conference.
She also said that there are 2,000 scientists focused on AI research and 600 doctoral students who work on artificial intelligence. And you may have noticed that there are quite a few French engineers and researchers who also work for AI companies in the US.
The team behind the French AI report looked better at the Top 400 AI startups in France and tried to identify the rising stars. Although Mistral AI and Poolide are already some well -known names for readers who have followed the AI industry, the vast majority of AI startups do not work on the next foundation model.
At the front of the infrastructure, some companies optimize the data work flows and pipelines, such as Linkup and Kestra, or improve the inference performance, such as such as such as ZMLOr developing agents who can search large data sets and improve productivity. Fabric is a good example of this.
But the reality is that most AI startups in France focus on applications for specific verticals. Based on this report, two important areas for AI startups in France are health and climate.
Owkin and his spin-off biotech company Bioptimus have led the peloton in the field of Health Tech, but it is a surprisingly diverse group of companies with three large areas of interest: imaging tools, drug discovery and improvement of medical treatment.
Similarly, although a large part of the AI industry is aimed at productivity gain for office workers, artificial intelligence is also actively used to build the next generation of climate startups. In addition to Agritech, carbon and energy management – two topics that are related – look like a great focus. There are also a handful of promising new materials companies that come up (for example Altrove).
All companies that are included in the list Can be found here. You will also find many AI companies that work on one function – sales, customer service, HR or legal – and the use of AI to simplify the most common tasks.
Some companies will of course not be there in five years. But many of them are currently growing at a rapid pace. We are still at the start of the AI revolution, and although it is easy to think of the AI industry as a zero-sum game with one country or a company that “wins” over the other, it seems that that The AI tree more is distributed than expected.
