June ecosystem news by Chris O’Brien for the French Tech International Community

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Welcome back to our monthly French Tech News roundup. I am your host and guide, Chris O’Brien, an American journalist and the founder of The French Tech Journal newsletter.

June marked the return of Viva Technology, the French mega-conference that was forced to skip last year due to the pandemic. This edition was particularly notable because VivaTech became the first sizable European tech conference to welcome a live audience, albeit in a hybrid live-video format.

There were strict health rules -- either proof of vaccination or a recent COVID test. And organizers could only allow up to 5,000 attendees at any given moment. Still, it seemed to be a success. According to VivaTech, 26,000 people attended in-person, and another 114,000 watched the video streams.

Aside from the relief of actually getting to see so many influential figures gathered together, VivaTech is also a good showcase for understanding another important aspect of the French Tech ecosystem: corporates. The exhibition space is built around larger traditional companies such as LVMH and La Poste to highlight how they are working with startups and their own innovation projects. Getting corporates to invest more in startups and innovation is a crucial policy goal of the French Tech program.

Scale-Up Europe

VivaTech doesn’t generate a lot of big news. But perhaps the most interesting announcement was the official unveiling of the official set of recommendations by the Scale-Up Europe working group. The Macron administration announced the Scale-Up Europe initiative earlier this year in an effort to promote more cooperation across the continent around reforms that would boost entrepreneurship.

The report identifies five key challenges: Lack of late-stage funding, talent, developing deep tech startups, lack of collaboration between startups and corporates, and regulatory consistency across European nations. In terms of specific recommendations, you can read a good summary of the 21 proposals here. But they all boil down to more coordination and cooperation across European nations.

In addition, Macron announced that he has a new goal. He previously set a target of 25 unicorns in France by 2025. Now he wants to see 10 companies worth more than €100 billion in Europe by 2030.

France will get a chance to push this effort further in a few months when it hosts the E.U. presidency starting in January 2022.

Funding and finance

The drumbeat of big funding rounds continued. Just after our last newsletter in late May, Contentsquare raised $500 million, a new French funding record. Ledger, which makes a cryptocurrency hardware wallet, raised $380 million. And Aircall, the cloud-based voice platform, raised $120 million. And I interviewed the founder of Malt for Sifted.eu after the company raised €80 million.

Finally, digital music company Believe went public on the Paris Stock Exchange. There was tremendous hype leading up to the debut. Believe helps musicians distribute and monetize their music online via its Tunecore service.

The stock didn’t do great on the first day as the share price initially fell after trading began. But the French ecosystem is eager to see more exits. And across Europe, political leaders want to see the continent’s stock markets support more IPOs so companies don’t have to leave for the U.S. to go public.

Believe may not have fixed that problem. But it's IPO offers a glimmer of hope that things may be turning a corner.

And now you’re all caught up!