cross pond high tech

Paris-based startup LightOn unveiled today its Appliance, the world’s most powerful photonic co-processor for AI and HPC. Initially

Qarnot Computing, a French company developing sustainable high performance computing (HPC), has raised a €6 million Series B round from Banque des Territoires, Caisse des Dépôts, Engie Rassembleur d’Énergies, A/O PropTech, and Groupe Casino. A combination of climate tech and cloud computing, Qarnot sells cloud computing capacity to clients. When its computer servers generate heat, …

Getaround, the peer-to-peer car-sharing startup that launched at TC Disrupt back in 2011, is making moves to become a global car rental service. Today, the SoftBank-backed startup announced its acquisition of Drivy, a Paris-headquartered car-sharing startup that operates in 170 European cities.

“We were obviously looking at what our European strategy was and how we would expand out of the U.S. and into other parts of the world,” Getaround CEO Sam Zaid told TechCrunch. “When we started looking at Europe, it became clear Drivy was the market leader. They also shared the same vision.”

This marks Getaround’s first expansion out of the U.S. As part of the deal, Drivy founder and CEO Paulin Dementhon will run the company’s operations in Europe as CEO for the continent.

“Getaround is an ideal partner for us because our companies are aligned in so many ways while being complementary on key aspects of our business, like geography or fleet acquisition,” Dementhon said in a statement. “I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish together.”

Combined with Drivy, Getaround now has more than five million users. Moving forward, Getaround has its eyes set on becoming a truly global company.

Historically, startups have been the engine of US economy. By creating new jobs and surfacing new ideas, startups play an outsized role in making the economy grow.

It’s too bad they are a dying breed.

While companies that were less than two years old made up about 13% of all companies in 1985, they only accounted for 8% in 2014.

From around 1998 to 2010, the share of private sector workers in companies that were less than two years old plummeted from more than 9% to less than 5%.

A new report from the Brookings Institution, finds that in nearly every industry, from agriculture to finance, the share of new companies is falling.

 

So what’s going on?

It’s not entirely clear, but the authors of the Brookings report have some ideas.

One possibility: Startups are struggling in this era of rising market concentration. In most industries, since the 1980s, the share of all sales going to the top firms is increasing. Startups may have a hard time competing with these mega firms, which can out pay them for the best talent and sometimes attempt to drive them out of the industry. Previous Brookings research found there are fewer startups in states where a smaller number of companies dominate the market (pdf).

Another related possibility is that the most-educated American workers are no longer attracted to entrepreneurship. In 1992, 4% of 25-54 year olds with a master’s degree or PhD owned a small company with at least 10 employees. In 2017, this was true of only 2.2%. Companies started by the highly educated are often unusually productive.

The Brookings report suggests that high salaries for educated employees at big companies have made entrepreneurship less compelling. Why compete with Google or Walmart when they are offering you an enormous amount of money to come work for them?

French startup Algolia just raised a $53 million Series B round led by Accel, a couple of years after raising $18.3 million with… Accel also leading the round. So it looks like it’s a love story between the VC firm and the software-as-a-service startup.

The reason is quite simple. Algolia is still growing like crazy, with its annual recurring revenue doubling every year. Algolia’s goal hasn’t changed — the startup wants to provide the best search experience to everyone building websites and apps out there.

Jason Lemkin’s SaaStr fund, Jyoti Bansal, Clark Valberg and Des Traynor are also participating in today’s round, as well as existing investors Alven Capital, Point Nine Capital and Storm Ventures.

Just like Twilio is handling calls and text messages for you so you don’t have to, Algolia can also take care of the search box on your website. In just a few lines of code, you can replace your search feature with Algolia’s search.

You’ll need to feed Algolia with your search data and customize it to your needs, as well. After that, every time a user starts typing a letter, it’ll query one of Algolia’s servers and return results in no time. It’s quite remarkable to see how quickly and accurately it works.

And chances are that you’ve been using Algolia without realizing it. The company is managing the search feature on Medium, DigitalOcean, Twitch, Stripe, Periscope, Crunchbase and many others.

The company now has 3,000 customers and handles 25 billion searches every month. Recently, the startup launched a fallback version of Algolia called Algolia Offline that you can use if you’re in airplane mode or don’t have a strong signal. Algolia also optimized its search feature for places.

With today’s funding round, Algolia is going to open another office in London after Paris, San Francisco, New York City and Atlanta. And of course, the company wants to get new customers, build new features and maybe one day become the Stripe of search.

If you ask a passerby about France, you are likely to get bombarded with clichés — you’ll get the wine, the cheese and the baguette thrown back at you within 30 seconds. If you’re lucky, you may get something on Camus or Baudelaire (but then you have really lucked out, so do pinch yourself). French tech is probably the last thing that would come up in the conversation. This, though, has been quietly, and rapidly, changing — the tech scene in France is gaining massive traction.

 

Now, it would be untrue to say that this is a completely new trend and that tech investors have entirely neglected France. Many, like ourselves, have been a fixture at the (sadly defunct) LeWeb, we invested in early French startups like Seesmic and Jolicloud, were avid readers of Rude Baguette (and its author’s subsequent thoughts and insights), and its predecessor Tech Baguette. After all, the first institutional round of Criteo was over 10 years ago. What has really changed, though, is the rate of change. France is rapidly entering an acceleration. So watch your backs, Silicon Valley, Sentier is after you!

 

Conscious of the accelerating pace of change in France, which we first flagged publicly in our 2016 State of European Tech Report, a large portion of the Atomico team headed to Paris last week to meet the with start-ups, investors and the wider founder and tech community.

 

Did I mention we are really excited about French tech? L-R Bryce Keane, Sophia Bendz, @nzennstrom, Yann de Vries, Evgenia Plotnikova (that’s me :-)), dmhynes, Niall Wass and alexis bonte

 

Have we seen a tipping point, a déclic? The indications are clear. France is now challenging the UK as an investment destination, having surpassed Germany for the first time in years. $2.7 billion was invested in France in 2016, up 63% on the previous year, vs $2.1bn raised by German start-ups in the same period and $3.7bn invested in the UK. With €472m already put to work across 169 rounds to date (according to Dealroom.co), 2017 is looking good. I, for one, tend to think that although the pace of change is accelerating, conditions for it have been fertilizing the French soil for a number of years.

 

Below are some of the reasons I think the time is now ripe for French entrepreneurs to take centre stage.

C’est confirmé. Selon nos informations, Devialet, qui s’est fait une réputation avec ses enceintes haut de gamme, doit officialiser dans la journée une nouvelle levée de fonds de 100 millions d’euros. Celle-ci, qui avait fuité dans la presse il y a une quinzaine de jours, coordonnée par la banque d’affaires Bryan Garnier&co, occasionne l’arrivée de nouveaux investisseurs.

Dont Ginko ventures, une société de capital-risque suisse spécialisée dans la tech, créée en 2015, financée notamment par le géant taïwanais Foxconn, fabricant de produits électroniques et sous-traitant d'Apple. Par la même occasion, Jean-François Baril, fondateur et directeur général de Ginko, entre au conseil d’administration de Devialet. Parmi les autres nouveaux investisseurs cités figure le fabricant japonais d'électronique Sharp, acquis en 2016 par Foxconn.

Mais aussi, surprise, l’ancienne ministre de la culture et de la communication Fleur Pellerin fait une arrivée remarquée dans l’ex-start-up française devenue grande. Premier coup, joli coup. Trois mois après le lancement de son fonds Korelya Capital, elle doit annoncer ce 28 novembre un "investissement significatif" au sein de Devialet, selon un proche du dossier.

Il s’agit de la première opération de ce jeune fonds. Et dans la foulée, l’ex-ministre rejoindra le conseil d’administration de la société française spécialisée dans le son haut de gamme. Korelya avait été abondé à hauteur de 100 millions d’euros par le mastodonte de l’Internet sud-coréen Naver et sa filiale Line, connue pour son service de messagerie instantanée.

While the Phantom is a product that’s actually for sale in places such as the Apple store, its real purpose is to showcase Devialet’s audio technologies. In a recent interview, Devialet CEO Quentin Sannié explained that the company’s ultimate goal is to get its technology into everything from phones, to cars, to television sets — really, anything that outputs audio.

The Phantom is a showcase for two of Devialet’s developments: a software-based technology called Speaker Active Matching (SAM) and a hardware-based amplification system that combines an analog amp with a digital one. Sannié says that the SAM algorithm could be implemented into any digital signal processor, even the one in your phone, and can improve the sound quality of hundreds of devices. The algorithm is developed by measuring the behavior of each speaker and then creating a mathematical model to control how the speaker behaves. This measurement process can be done in about 10 minutes using special, laser-based tools the company developed for it.

The Phantom is a showcase for Devialet's technologies

Sannié says that a system using SAM can reproduce lower frequencies without changing its hardware at all, and it can even enable noise-cancellation without the need for a subwoofer. It’s part of the reason that the Phantom’s relatively small drivers move so quickly when the volume is cranked up and have little to no distortion. Sannié claims that SAM could even be used by a streaming service to optimize audio before it’s even delivered to a listener. A user could tell the service what kind of speakers or headphones they are using and the sound would be tailored just for them.

French robotics startup Exotec has raised $90 million in a round of funding led by London-based VC firm 83North.

 

Founded out of Lille in 2015, Exotec develops autonomous industrial robots called Skypods that can move horizontally and vertically, and travel at speeds of up to 9mph. The robots constitute part of a “goods-to-person” picking system designed to improve productivity and reduce strain and physical exertion in human warehouse workers.

 

Ecommerce has boomed in 2020 due in large part to COVID-19, with online merchants seeing a 42% year-on-year increase in sales last month in the U.S. alone — data suggests that the global pandemic has led to an extra $107 billion in online sales since March. This surge in demand is good news for companies such as Exotec, which specialize in equipping large warehouses with the tools to pick and pack orders at scale.

Il a fallu 4 ans à l'Autorité de la concurrence pour condamner le Cartel des titres-restaurant, saisie par la startup RESTO FLASH : La French Tech est aussi une histoire de résilience ! Cet exemple illustre parfaitement les pratiques - dignes du siècle dernier - d'un secteur qui embrasse sa transformation digitale par le refus et le déni, et le rôle clé du régulateur qui protège et encourage les plus agiles et les plus fragiles. Pourtant, investir une fraction de cette somme dans l'entreprise, aux côtés de Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet ou Olivier Mathiot, aurait permis à l'un de ces acteurs de prendre de vitesse tous les autres. Les voici désormais englués dans le passé tandis que plusieurs startups ont emboité le pas à l'équipe d'Emmanuel Rodriguez-Maroto pour révolutionner le marché à la suite de RESTO FLASH.

Ce ne sont pas moins de 381 start-up françaises qui ont traversé l'océan pour venir présenter leurs produits au CES cette année. 334 d'entre elles exposent dans l'Eureka Park, la partie du Salon dédiée aux jeunes pousses, ce qui fait de la délégation française la plus importante de cet espace.

Selon les calculs d'Olivier Ezratty, l'Hexagone représente 26 % des jeunes entreprises présentes, contre 25 % pour les Etats-Unis.

Alors que la France pointait depuis plusieurs années au deuxième rang, c'est la première fois qu'elle se place devant ses homologues locaux.

Avec, entre Jeff Bezos et Jean-Marie Messier : 

 

Nous avons appris le départ de Philippe Dewost de la Caisse des Dépôts début septembre. Il occupait jusqu'à présent les fonctions de Directeur adjoint de la Mission «Programme d'Investissements d'Avenir» où il pilotait le secteur de l'économie numérique (enveloppe initiale de 4,25 milliards d’euros).

Philippe Dewost a commencé sa carrière professionnelle chez France Telecom comme co-fondateur de Wanadoo en 1995. Il a occupé des rôles de dirigeant dans plusieurs startups (Ukibi, Realeyes3D) avant de rejoindre en 2009 ImSense, une start-up de Cambridge spécialisée dans le traitement d’images, acquise par Apple en 2010 et dont la technologie eye-Fidelity est désormais utilisée 1/2 milliard de fois chaque jour.

L’ex pilote du rapport French Tech en 2013 rejoindra début Septembre un Groupe du CAC40 dont le nom n’a pas encore été révélé.

Start-up nation ?Deuxième atout, les décideurs internationaux classent la capacité de recherche et d’innovation au premier rang des atouts de la France, loin devant ses capacités touristiques et ses infrastructures. Un vrai changement d’appréciation."Ce n’est pas encore une image de start-up nation, mais c’est une perspective très positive", se félicite Marc Lhermitte.Un coup de chapeau à Fleur Pellerin, secrétaire d'Etat chargée de l'Economie numérique, qui a lancé la French Tech, ce label qui regroupe toutes les jeunes entreprises françaises technologiques. Flambeau repris par Axelle Lemaire et Emmanuel Macron, avec les encouragements de François Hollande. Ils se sont efforcés de promouvoir les start-up, mais aussi de rendre la fiscalité et les réglementations plus hospitalières.

Roundingout its embedded technology offer, Kalray has expanded its processingcapabilities to the world of artificial intelligence. The company is introducinga highly optimized deep learning solution targeting embedded applications likeautonomous cars, avionics, drones, robotics and more. The solution is capableof supporting all of the most commonly-used deep learning neural networks andframework, such as GoogleNet, Squeezenet, CAFFE and more.

Kalray’s deep learning solution includes:

• MPPA®2-256 Bostan manycore processor:industry-recognized 288-core processor
• Kalray Neural Network (KaNN): deep learningsoftware tool used in the development and evaluation of neural networks on MPPA®.KaNN is compatible with all commonly-used deep learning networks.

In terms of pure performance, Kalray is able to leverage the288 cores of its MPPA®2-256 Bostan processor in order to efficiently processnotoriously compute-heavy deep learning algorithms. To do this, the solutionuses the extensive on-chip memory of the Bostan processor and it spreads thecompute-heavy aspects of deep learning – data dependent layers and weightparameters – across the MPPA®’s numerous cores. The result is particularlyefficient processing – up to 60 frames per second while running “GoogleNet”– outperformingthe most efficient GPUs addressing today’s embedded market.

L'année dernière, Carlos Diaz, un entrepreneur limougeaud habitant à San Francisco depuis sept ans, a reçu en tête-à-tête les PDG de 113 start-up hexagonales. Identifié par les entrepreneurs comme une figure française de la Silicon Valley depuis sa participation au mouvement des « pigeons » en 2012, il s'est retrouvé bombardé d'e-mails de jeunes créateurs d'entreprise, avides de conseils sur l'installation de ce côté-ci de l'Atlantique. Il s'est dit qu'il existait sûrement une manière plus efficace de les aider que d'enchaîner les cafés… 

Avec deux autres chefs d'entreprise de la Vallée, Géraldine Le Meur, cofondatrice du festival LeWeb, et Pierre Gaubil, un autre serial entrepreneur, ils ont décidé de lancer un accélérateur de start-up françaises basé à San Francisco. Baptisé «  The Refiners », il accueillera 12 à 15 start-up n'ayant pas encore réalisé de levée de fonds, pendant trois mois, deux fois par an. La première promotion commencera en septembre. 

Des modèles américains

L'accélérateur prendra 3 à 7 % de leur capital, en échange d'un chèque de 50.000 dollars pour les aider à démarrer. Un modèle inspiré des fameux accélérateurs Y Combinator et 500 Startups, d'où sont sortis Airbnb, Twitch ou Makerbot, mais qui prendra en compte  « le fossé culturel, un élément trop souvent négligé », explique Carlos Diaz.  « Pendant les trois premières semaines, on fermera les portes et les fenêtres car ils ne seront pas "montrables" et on leur apprendra comment agir ici », détaille-t-il. Au programme, quelques éléments clefs de la culture de la Silicon Valley, comme la différence entre les fonds de capital-risquefrançais et américains, ces derniers  « ne demandant pas des tableurs et des business plans à trois ans », explique Pierre Gaubil. Ou encore la différence de relation avec les grandes entreprises :  « dans la Silicon Valley, les grands comptes ne sont pas un élément de destruction des produits des start-up mais des partenaires qui les distribuent ».

Doté de 6 millions de dollars, le fonds est abondé à 60 % par une centaine de partners, moitié américains, moitié français, qui endossent également le rôle de mentors. Les 40 % restants sont apportés par bpifrance. 

Des licornes plutôt que des poneys

Imagine there was a device that could help make your car run quicker, cheaper and help you save the environment? Well that’s what OOCar is offering with its latest service.

The startup claims it can save you as much as 30 percent on fuel costs and 40 percent on insurance premiums. Not bad.

When the dreaded engine warning light comes on, it can give you a breakdown of the damage and also a rough cost of repairs, so you can tell if a mechanic is trying to pull a fast one. The app is only available in France right now, but the team hopes to start expanding across Europe soon.