Future of Work, Web3, Cookiesless World... what trends we are seeing at STATION F now

Since the beginning of the year, we have welcomed over 150 new startups to campus, which sounds huge but is only 15% of campus. During that same time we also launched 4 new programs including Hectar (agritech), TotalEnergies (clean energies), Cegid (future of work) and 212 (bridging EMEA markets) and kicked off the new Qonto-Payfit space, our first ever space run by 2 unicorns.

We also have seen a dramatic increase in the number of STATION F companies to secure funding - including a few Future 40 companies that announced rounds like Stonly (22M$), BigBlue (15M$), Interstellar Labs (5M€), Starton (3,8M€), Healthy Mind (1M€), Deskare (1,2M€) and more.

But in addition to all that has been happening on campus, we have witnessed a few growing and rapidly evolving trends.

How Future of Work is redefining the office

Deskare founding team (Victor Fritz, Thomas Dauphin, Vianney Goater)

With Covid (hopefully) coming to an end, we are noticing that while there are some companies that embraced being “fully remote”, it is not really a major trend after all. This was also confirmed in some of the initial data we saw after the first Covid lockdown in 2020. Some of the major tech companies announced plans to return to the office, with hybrid and flexible ways of working becoming the dominant trend. As a result, we have seen an explosion of solutions helping companies in this new hybrid world.

Companies want to have better visibility over the remote workforce, but employees do too. Solutions like Deskare (Future 40 2021), M-Work and Ceercle provide better visibility on who is in the office and who is elsewhere. These solutions can also help teams better plan when to be in certain locations, for in-person and face to face interactions. Tools are also addressing talent retention issues like Palm is, building a single platform to manage your employee skills and career path. A lot of these products are particularly helpful to large organizations that juggle a variety of workforces - which is why we see these companies working with a lot of corporate customers.

While hybrid is perhaps adopted by the majority of organizations, there are a lot of workers that enjoy being remote and that seek out these types of opportunities. Stakha is a great example of a platform that is dedicated to matching candidates with fully remote opportunities. As for freelances, who were accustomed to hybrid and remote work even prior to Covid, we are seeing platforms like Pylote that seek to simplify the experience of managing a profile on various freelance platforms.

The rise of vertical and job-specific productivity tools

Productivity tools have been around at STATION F since its beginning with newcomers such as Kairn, a daily productivity tool for you and your team. But these last few months we’ve seen more and more startups building team-specific tools.

For example, we are seeing sales-specific tools like Amalia (Future 40 2021), Katalyz and Kara.ai (Future 40 2020). These tools address compensation, sales processes, forecasting and more for remote sales teams and customers.

Product development is also an area where we are seeing more solutions emerging: DivRiots brings collaboration between designers and front end developers, starting with BackLight, a specialized development environment for design systems. Solutions that foster in-product collaboration are also emerging: Iteration X allows teams to annotate and edit any website or web app, right for the browser and iterate directly on their live product.

There are even solutions targeting the simplification of legal processes, like Leeway (Future 40 2020) for contract management and Dastra for GDPR compliance.

Imagining a cookiesless world

Sqwad founding team (Mehdi Rifai, Anis Chagar, Mohcine Heddi)

Although Google’s plan to phase out third party cookies won’t be effective until late 2023, we’ve been noticing more and more cookiesless solutions arriving at STATION F over the last few months. Addressing the urge for marketers to find new strategies and alternatives to third party data, without bearing the current rise of acquisition costs.

Some think that the best option is to explore the potential of lookalike brands: startups such as Kobi or Sqwad are relying on collaboration between like-minded brands to thrive together and cut their acquisition costs.

No-code, low-code and everything in-between

No-code and low-code tools have been around for quite some time now, but their usage is expected to almost triple by 2025 - which means that we will likely continue to see a ton of innovation in this space.

Many companies use no-code and no-code solutions to build internal tools easily and cost-efficiently. Blitz has built a full-on solution for companies to build their internal tools without a single line of code.

No code platforms can also become a way for companies to put highly tech tools into the hands of their business stakeholders: Deep Talk is implementing deep learning models as a service through a no-code platform to analyze text, emails, chats, surveys and any conversational data. On the same topic, Threedium is developing a low code cloud platform, that allows brands to create, manage and deploy 3D/AR solutions across any digital and physical channel.

All eyes on decentralized infrastructure & Web3

The team behind Starton

It is impossible to talk about tech trends on campus without mentioning the web3 phenomenon, which has been shaking the ecosystem for a few months now - and STATION F is no exception. We find it particularly interesting to see entrepreneurs navigating through the buzzwords to build real use cases integrating blockchain at the heart of their product.

We have a lot of NFT projects popping up at STATION F and we are super excited about them (check Sandaga, actor Omar Sy’s crypto project), or solutions such as Bift or Pikomit that are adding a social layer on top of NFT marketplaces.

But we’ve been also seing companies using DAOs as a part of their business model: CrunchDAO is developing the first DAO-powered market neutral fund, relying on more than 1600 data scientists and PhDs to drive the performance of their hedge fund.

We are also seeing the emergence of solutions that are focused on bringing infrastructure and security to Web3 such as Guer Labs, a blockchain - and decentralized-network focused research company developing next-generation privacy and security tools. Aleph.im and Starton (Future 40 2021) are also great examples of startups that are making blockchain more accessible to all companies building decentralized apps.

Aside from these great startups, we have more plans for web3 that will be announced shortly. Stay tuned.

Mafias, and a new generation of entrepreneurs

teale's founding team (Geoffroy Verzat, Julia Néel-Biz, Nicolas Merlaud, Gilles Rasigade)

STATION F may be huge but the ecosystem has grown so much that today we are only just a small part of it. The trends that we witness on campus tend to be smaller scale than the trends happening in the greater ecosystem - or sometimes that we can identify before they ripple.

We are currently witnessing a new generation of entrepreneurs that are leaving some of the now-leading local companies to create their own startups. In other words, we are seeing more and more mafias.

Blablacar was one of the first local companies to openly discuss its mafia - or former employees that were now building their own companies (a few that we have at STATION F) - but we are also seeing new founding teams from Dataiku, Kapten, Aircall, OpenClassroom or Everoad (acq. by Sennder) launching companies at STATION F these last few months. Teale, Giskard or Ozzen are examples of STATION F’s startups emerging from this new wave of entrepreneurs. Some of them might build something using the experience and market knowledge acquired during these previous experiences, others are working on radically different products - but all of them carry a precious expertise and entrepreneurial mindset that benefit the STATION F ecosystem.

Trends have changed a lot in a short while

While our campus isn’t that old (we are almost 5!) the trends do change rather quickly. In the early days we saw a lot of mobile apps and AI was sprinkled in a majority of the projects. And then there are topics like B2B SaaS that are engrained deeply in this ecosystem and seem to only get stronger. We’ve also seen some of our partners shift priority - for example Microsoft, who was leading our AI Program, recently repositioned to focus on clean tech. More programs addressing these trends are about to join the campus in the coming months. Stay tuned!