STATION F celebrates 7 years with 65 nationalities on campus

When we published our first stats in 2018, a majority of our campus was first-time entrepreneurs and the fundraising environment was far less developed than it was today. For the last 2 years, our startups have raised over €1 billion annually, which is more than 2x the amount raised in our first few years. Today, things are clearly very different. We are proud to have made a lot of improvements to STATION F since our launch, including launching housing, a new restaurant, many new programs and partnerships - and growing campus to 50,000m2, which we celebrated last year. And there is still have a lot more to come!

65 nationalities and counting

Building global companies means leveraging international talent. We have always been incredibly proud to attract entrepreneurs and talent from around the world. Our community includes 65 different nationalities that span all of the continents - including countries like Honduras, Nepal, Djibouti, Iraq and Vietnam.

Rata Jacquemart is the CEO of AI startup Differs and originally from Thailand

The countries that are currently the best represented on campus (after France) are, in order:

1. USA

2. Morocco

3. Italy

4. Tunisia

5. South Korea

Ellen Kelly is the CEO of SAVVY, a sustainable investment platform, and originally from Ireland

Many people are surprised when they learn that the US is the #2 country on campus, after France - but this has been the case since our launch.

The founding team of Spore.bio (Future 40 2023). Two of the founders are of Moroccan origin

We continue to see lots of interest from different countries that want to send their companies to STATION F to access the European market. This is why we launched the International Program earlier this year, allowing us to host startups from different countries.

Record funding for companies

As mentioned above, our companies have been raising record amounts of funding over the last 2 years - both 2022 and 2023 our companies collectively raised over €1 billion annually, which was approximately 15% of the global volume of the French ecosystem in 2023.

So far, 2024 has been quite strong as well. Our companies raised approximately €400 million in the first semester, which is more than the €360 million from S1 of 2023. This is slightly less than 2022 but we are quite confident that our companies will continue to attract investment. We are seeing a shift in the types of business to secure funding, even when compared with 2023. For example, in 2023, AI secured nearly 4x more funding than any other topic. This year, we are seeing CleanTech taking the lead.

900.care founders Aymeric Grange and Thomas Arnaudo, who announced a €21 million round in March 2024

And of course, international investors are clearly (way) more present than they were a few years ago - only 20% of our funded companies say they do not have any international investors (yet). We have also recently started to see more acquisitions as well. Over the years, our companies have been acquired by companies like SAP, Magic Leap, Jasper AI, Veepee, TotalEnergies - and more recently Apple and Samsung.

Some of the Sonio founding team. The company was recently acquired by Samsung Medison for €92 million

Over 50% of companies have women in the cap table

While in previous years, we were very concerned with the number of female founders, these numbers have more or less stabilized around 40% of our companies being founded or co-founded by women. We are now also interested in making sure our companies include diversity in their cap table from the beginning. Currently, only 43% of companies who have fundraised do not have any women in the cap table. We know that this is still not a perfect score, but were happy to see that over 50% of financed companies do have female investors.

Not all companies turning to public funding and unemployment benefits

Now, as there is a potential overhaul of the French unemployment benefits looming in the near future alongside the legislative elections, we thought it may be interesting to understand how these benefits have contributed to entrepreneurship. We did not take this data in previous years but we have learned that 39% of our current companies were created with unemployment benefits, which is approximately 10% less than what we had estimated. This could be in part because we are seeing more repeat founders (currently over 50% of our population are repeat founders), meaning they may have an easier time at raising, may be self-funded or may not be eligible for such benefits.

However, when it comes to public funding instruments, 57% of our companies have received some form of financial support through BPI (although we did not consider indirect support through BPI-backed funds, meaning this number is likely much higher). The amount of companies who have been supported by BPI and unemployment benefits is actually less than we had expected as well - approximately 28% of companies.

Some of our favorite moments on campus

Now that we have gone through some of the data, we want to take this occasion to look back on some of our favorite moments from the last few months - many of which happen to be focused on AI! Hosting Yann LeCun for our AI Dinner with Hugging Face, announcing the new AI programs with Meta and Microsoft, hosting Dario Amodei for an exclusive Ask Me Anything.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei speaking at STATION F in May 2024

But we have also enjoyed many non-AI moments: having actor Matthieu Kassovitz on campus (who has a strong interest in Quantum Computing), launching our new HRtech program with LabRH and Deel, welcoming more international entrepreneurs through our International Program, as well as the Prime Minister of Albania.

Actor Matthieu Kassovitz meeting with quantum startups in April 2024

The Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, speaking at Station F in April 2024

We have a lot more lined up this year - and we look forward to sharing it with you all soon! We want to thank all our entrepreneurs, partners and the greater community for their support - STATION F only works because of everyone’s collective effort.