STATION F 2024: a year marked by international entrepreneurs and climate (oh, and even more AI)

2024 was a very exciting and dynamic year, and not just in the ecosystem. Paris hosted the Olympics, President Macron dissolved the National Assembly, and now France prepares for the upcoming AI Summit in February 2025. On campus, we welcomed more international and experienced entrepreneurs and saw strong early-stage funding. And while everyone is obsessed with AI, we saw very promising signals for ClimateTech.

2024 in a nutshell

2024 was not the easiest year to navigate and clearly kept us on our toes. There were multiple political shake ups and elections around the world, having an impact on ecosystems we follow closely like the US, UK and France. And despite the complexity, these situations also allow us to test the robustness of our local ecosystem. At STATION F and despite everything, we continued to see a very strong early-stage environment with our companies raising over €1 billion for the 3rd consecutive year in a row. French companies also took center stage in Europe, raising a majority of the larger rounds of funding this year. And with France hosting the big AI Action Summit in early 2025, we are seeing lots of excitement and momentum - even as the year comes to a close.

Funding: €1bn raised for the 3rd consecutive year

To give you an idea, STATION F companies raised the same amount this year as the entire Italian ecosystem in 2023 (yes, the whole country). If we consider that the global amount raised by French companies is likely somewhere around €7 billion, STATION F is likely contributing around 14% of all funding raised for the French ecosystem. Naturally, AI was the best-funded topic in terms of the amount raised. It is worth noting that AI is cross-vertical, particularly in HealthTech and ClimateTech. However, if we focus solely on sectors, these two verticals attracted the most capital. With this in mind, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the biggest round of funding (after Alan’s €173m round this summer), is Greenly’s €49m round. 

This chart represents the amounts of funds raised at STATION F in 2024, broken down by sectors

When it comes to investors, we are seeing a lot more of our companies raising with international funds and micro funds or family offices. Family offices like Motier, Kima Ventures, Purple, Creadev, Financière St. James and more are often where our early-stage companies stop first (well, after Bpifrance). In addition, we are also seeing more micro funds and solo GP funds gaining traction, like Yellow, Common Magic, No Label VC, Origins and more. Our investor community now counts over 500 investment vehicles who receive the list of our monthly fundraising companies.

35 Future 40 companies funded in 2024

We have hosted 6 editions of the Future 40 to date, bringing the total number of companies to 240 (here are the 40 companies that were selected this year). However, 35 Future 40 companies announced funding rounds this year - over 2x the amount of Future 40 companies who raised in 2023. The biggest round to date for any Future 40 company was Qantev’s €30million round announced in October. We had 6 Future 40 companies announce rounds of over €10 million this year, including 900.care (€21M), Raidium (€16M), Dottxt (€11M) and others. And to our surprise, 3 of this year’s Future 40 companies were funded by EQT Ventures, making them the best represented fund in this year’s batch.

More repeat entrepreneurs on campus

Over the last 12 months we have seen many more founders who have very solid previous experience - either repeat founders or coming from mafias like Dataiku, Blablacar, Criteo, Doctolib, Owkin, Algolia and more. If we ignore corporates like Google and AWS, the biggest mafia communities we have on campus come from Criteo, Dataiku, and Rocket Internet. However, we have mapped over 30 different mafias that have multiple teams at STATION F currently.

New Programs on campus: strong climate and international focus

Just as any other year, we welcomed quite a few new partners and programs to campus. We launched our first HR tech program with LabRH x Deel in the beginning of the year. Then we teamed up with HEC Paris to launch our first International Programs with South Korea’s KOSME and Japan’s Jetro, bringing more International teams to STATION F. While STATION F has always been very international, we discovered over the summer that we had 65 nationalities on campus. And towards the end of the year, we announced 2 new sustainability-themed programs with Marble and Huawei. We decided to also highlight some of our top climate startups on campus, by launching the Climate 10 fellowship. For countries that want to strengthen their ecosystems, we hosted another edition of our 2-day intensive Immersion Program, with participants from Mexico, Portugal, Italy, Bahrain and the US.

Huawei’s first batch kick-off at STATION F

Was that enough AI for you?

Clément Delangue (CEO of Hugging Face) during an Ask Me Anything at STATION F

Is it possible to overdose on AI? I literally don’t think it would be possible to host more AI events and programs on campus :) So many of our partners hosted incredible programs and events all throughout the year. Microsoft launched a new GenAI Studio, Meta opened its program up to European companies, AWS hosted its GenAI loft (and brought their robots to campus!), Google hosted a series of incredible AI workshops, EF hosted its AI School, we hosted Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and Clement Delangue (Hugging Face) for Ask me Anything sessions (Clem got a camemBERT from the audience!). Oh, and we hosted 2 massive AI dinners with Hugging Face and Mistral, the 2nd edition of AI Pulse by Scaleway, a massive Mistral hackathon and more. There really is too much AI to keep track of!

What do the King of Bhutan, Justin Trudeau and Pharrell have in common?

Well, they all visited STATION F in 2024. In fact, we continue to welcome numerous high profile guests. Some highlights from this year included the King of Bhutan, Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, Pharrell Williams (who hosted a Black Ambition event at STATION F during the Olympic Games). And while he didn’t stop by campus this time, we also had a chance to catch-up with Satya Nadella when he came to Paris.

Pharrell Williams during Black Ambition Competition event at STATION F, August 2024

Yoga Studio and Lobster Statues

Naturally, we also continued to improve our facilities and services for our entrepreneurs. This year we launched a bike repair shop and yoga studio just alongside campus - and more services will be launched in the new year. And while the lobster statues were not permanent, we were pleased to host some of Philip Colbert’s work during the Olympic Games. We are hoping to host more up-and-coming artists on campus!

Now, what’s next!

All Things AI and climate

We are already feeling the excitement as France gears up to host the AI Action Summit in February. At STATION F, we are planning to host a lot of key players from the AI landscape for numerous events during the summit dates. And we are not expecting AI momentum to slow down afterwards. There is very clearly a very strong local AI community and we continue to see very strong teams working on new, ambitious ideas. We are expecting this to continue. Plus, we have many of the leading players in the AI landscape as partners at STATION F and will continue to reinforce this community on campus. Now, when it comes to climate, this year we started to see a clear growing interest whether it be in terms of funding, partners, top companies and even events. We are making supporting climate companies a top priority and will continue to look for credible partners and key resources to give our companies the best chance to succeed. We have always felt that the European regulatory environment could also be very beneficial for climate tech companies.

Internationally yours

We are incredibly proud to be home to 65 nationalities on campus and to see a growing interest from other countries who want to learn from and even copy our model. We plan to work very closely to support select ecosystems where we see great potential and interest for our entrepreneurs and community. And we plan to welcome even more entrepreneurs from abroad to campus (the French Tech Visa is widely used by our community).

Scaling like we mean it

While STATION F has always supported and will continue to support early-stage companies, we are seeing more and more of our companies and alumni starting to scale. In fact, some of our early-stage companies move incredibly quickly - raising sizable rounds and outgrowing our current offers within less than a year. So while we will continue to stay focused on early-stage companies, we will also begin to explore further supporting some of our best-performing companies as they grow. Prepare to find our next unicorn right here on campus :)

Thank you for an amazing 2024

Now, I’d like to once again take this occasion to thank everyone who has been part of our community during this past year. Without all of you, STATION F is just an empty hall. It's our incredible community, partners and supporters who bring the place to life and allow us to help build the companies that will shape tomorrow. Thank you!