November ecosystem news by Kyle O’Brien for the French Tech International Community

This community is the key for foreign entrepreneurs in France to expand their network, meet other foreign and French entrepreneurs, share advice on living and working in France, and get access to exclusive content and resources!

Hello, everyone! Kyle here, the Founder of Startup ROI, a weekly newsletter where we explore global technology trends and how they manifest themselves in France. Here's a peek into what's going on in French Tech this month.

National Strategy AI & Cloud - Cedric O

If you're not familiar with Cédric O, you will be! He's the French Minister for the Digital Economy and tightly linked with all things French Tech from a public policy perspective. This week, he announced a €2.2B investment, 5-year investment in Artificial Intelligence with a premium put on talent acquisition and education. This comes on the heels of his announcement earlier this month of a €1.8B public investment to develop France's cloud ecosystem. It appears Macron's vision for digital sovereignty is coming to fruition.

Go Deeper:

• You can read more about the France is AI Conference here

• Learn about Digital Sovereignty and the public-private initiatives to achieve it here

Pigment Raises a Series B

French Tech startup, Pigment, paints itself as the business planning and forecasting platform for growth companies. Their solution seeks to replace the ever-present Excel among other heavier, complex enterprise tools with an agile, drag & drop business intelligence engine. Their initial target users were within finance teams but this additional cash injection will help them achieve a broader vision of enabling technical & non-technical operators alike to use agile, predictive modeling. Users can build reports and dashboards by piping in critical business data, running "what-if" scenarios and collaborating with teammates in-app. They boast French Tech customers like BlaBlaCar, ManoMano, Algolia, Luko, Malt and Spendesk among their early adopters.

Explore Further:

• Pigment raises $73M to take on Excel and generic spreadsheet players in the world of business planning and forecasting - TechCrunch

• Pigment accelerates growth to power the world’s next unicorns and become the most used business planning tool with $73M Series B - Pigment Newsroom

Fundraising by Category

Fundraising announcements happen so often it's hard to find the signal through the noise. Sure, it's great that deal volume is up and each week we seem to shatter another funding record. But to make sense of it all, I like to organize the various startups into broader market trends. Here's my take on the headline funding rounds so far in November:

From my vantage point, French Tech has built a narrative around several themes: climate & sustainability, deep tech & scientific innovation, culture & creativity. These core elements have only been reinforced by Macron's France 2030 economic plans and it seems to be reflected in recent funding announcements. There appears to be something unique (and effective!) about the public/private collaboration in the French Tech ecosystem. The sheer variability of products listed in the chart above is astonishing, yet their alignment towards overarching national priorities is even more impressive. With the aforementioned government sponsored initiatives in Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence, perhaps we can forecast funding trends for the coming months!

Whether you're interested in IoT-enabled electric thread, eco-friendly fashion, audio production and distribution or alternative investing strategies, there's something in this list for you to explore.

Primo1d - IoT for Industry €15M

360 Medics - Tools & Resources for Healthcare €10M

Groover - Music Promotion Tool €6M

Stockpro - Circular Economy for Construction Materials €4M

Clear Fashion - App Promoting Transparency in Fashion €2M

Astrachain - Blockchain Secured Cloud €2M

Louve Invest - Real Estate Investment Platform €2M

Bridge Audio - Sharing & Collaboration App for Audio Creators €1M