STATION F 2025: a year marked by AI leaders, record-breaking funding, and more repeat & international entrepreneurs

This year may have been calmer without the Paris Olympics and dissolution of the National Assembly, but it still kept us on our toes! We welcomed an overwhelming amount of AI leaders for the AI Action Summit and beyond, witnessed record-breaking funding for our companies, and saw a strong increase in the number of repeat and international founders on campus.

2025 in a nutshell

What an emotional rollercoaster of a year! The beginning of the year kicked off with Stargate in the US and Deepseek in China - Europe was wondering if it had missed something. But the AI Action Summit arrived just in time, with France announcing €11bn in investments and suddenly the mood was back on - and has very much been ever since. AT STATION F specifically, our companies have been raising over €1bn annually since 2022 - and this year we hit the €1.5bn mark. We also were pleased to announce new partners on campus and to see an increase in international collaboration as well as the number of repeat entrepreneurs on campus.

Funding: €1.5 billion, baby!

That’s right! Our companies hit €1.5 billion raised this year, which is a huge milestone and a record for us. This amount was raised across 136 funding rounds, which included the likes of Multiverse Computing (€215m raised), Knave (€100m raised), Lizy (€75m raised) and more. And while AI/ML/Deeptech raised a ton of money, it was actually Climatetech that stole the show as the leading sector this year. As far as our Future 40 companies are concerned, the biggest rounds included Genesis (€90m), Genomines (€45m), Phagos (€25m) and Tomorro (€25m). There were a total of 32 Future 40 companies (all editions) who raised nearly €350m this year, representing around 20% of all campus funding.

When it comes to funds, our companies continued to raise with international funds, micro funds / solo GPs and family offices - as well as local funds. We also discovered that nearly half of our startups are using public funding through BPIfrance, and many are taking advantage of other fiscal advantages (CIR, JEI, etc).

Tony Parker at our exclusive Future 40 investor dinner

Exits: STATION F companies start acquiring!

While we still feel there is room for improvement with regards to exits, we did track 29 M&A deals this year - including a few that were quite noteworthy. One of our favorite deals was STATION F alumni Hugging Face who acquired Future 40 company Pollen Robotics in April. This is not the first time we’ve seen 2 STATION F companies team up. Not long after, H Company acquired STATION F company Mithril Security. We also saw a few more STATION F companies acquiring others - including Future 40 company Lemlist, who acquired Claap, and Healthy Mind, who acquired UK competitor Rescape Innovation. While we did see more M&A activity, we did learn that nearly 50% of companies who join STATION F are not particularly clear on their exit strategy and only 16% even consider the possibility of an IPO. There is clearly a lot more we can do to help educate and prepare founders from the early days with regards to their exit strategy.

New partners: from PSG to IndiaAI

Every year, we welcome new partners to campus and this year was no exception. We were pleased to announce new programs with PSG (and shortly afterwards they won the European Championship…coincidence?!), IndiaAI (quite timely before the AI Summit in India), EM Lyon and a new mentorship office for Snowflake. We also announced 2 programs with Moroccan organizations UM6P and OCP, making Morocco one of the best-represented countries on campus.

International: 70 nationalities and counting

Last year, campus boasted a whopping 65 nationalities and we honestly didn’t think that this number would get any bigger. But then it did. This year, our campus featured 70 nationalities and we also were pleased to co-host international programs with our partner HEC Paris and entrepreneurs from Japan, South Korea, India, Ivory Coast and more. We will continue to welcome additional countries to campus through these programs in the upcoming year. We also hosted the 3rd edition of our Immersion Program for ecosystems who are building similar campuses, with participants from the US, Nigeria, Oman and Andorra.

And while many people come to see us, we also go and visit ecosystems we want to team up with and learn from. In the past, we have visited our friends in Amsterdam, London, Berlin and Lisbon. This year, the team went to Dublin, where we saw our friends from Dogpatch Labs, Guinness Enterprise Center and Stripe (who else!).

The STATION F team at Dogpatch Labs in Dublin, July 2025

AI on campus!

Now, STATION F is clearly shaping up as one of the leading AI communities in Europe. We host not only many AI leaders as our partners, but also approximately 80% of our companies are in AI. Hosting part of the AI Action Summit in January also helped solidify this position. We were so honored to welcome the likes of Jonathan Ross (Groq), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Aravand Srinivas (Perplexity), Lisa Su (AMD) and many more.

AI Action Summit at STATION F

So, who else came to campus?

We continue to host many incredible people on campus on a regular basis. We added a few more Heads of State, Royal families and top CEOs to the list. Including the likes of Chuck Robbins (Cisco), the Prime Minister of Ethiopia and most recently the Prince of Jordan. And we were super honored to have the one and only Tony Parker attend our annual investors dinner this year!

Prince Hussein bin Abdullah of Jordan and Amine Raji (CEO, Spore.bio – Future 40 2023)

New facilities: medical center, new restaurant & more!

Now, when we are not busy hosting fancy delegations and playing tour guide, we are doing our best to enrich our services and facilities for our startups! This year we continued to roll out additional facilities, right alongside our main building. These facilities now include: a yoga studio, a podcast studio, a bike repair workshop, a smartphone boutique - and we just added a medical clinic, Via Sana, and new restaurant, Riverside, to the mix! And there is still more coming :)

Up next in 2026

There is still so much coming, it still somehow feels like we are just getting started! Here are a few things we may be working on for 2026:

A new program?

There could be a new killer program in the mix. Or maybe there isn’t. Nobody really knows.

New partners

What is certain is that we have some incredible new partners that are lined up to join campus in the coming months, stay tuned :)

International

We will continue to support for international startups & partners on campus. But there is just so much interest coming from abroad! So this will likely be an area we’ll double down on.

Thank you, to our whole community!

As always, I’d like to finish by thanking everyone who is part of our community - partners, startups, friends, supporters, whoever. So many people play a part in making STATION F what it is and you know that none of this would be possible without you.

Now on to 2026!