Yet another startup competition?! Why this one is crucial for European AI’s future…

After working with startups for a decade, I’ve seen a lot of trends come and go. Think blockchain, think IoT… But what’s happening in AI is exceptional, for many reasons. So here’s why I’ve never been more excited about the arrival of a new type of tech!

With every wave of technology, the hopes of what it might fundamentally change are often undermined by its moderate impact in the short term.

But once the hype has passed, I’d argue that hearing less about a certain technology is also a sign of its maturity. We become unaware of the technology behind a product or service, and talk only about the applications built on top of it. 

ChatGPT really opened the path of democratizing AI solutions towards general public audiences, making it easier in turn for new solutions to be experienced and deployed in various industries.

Generative AI solutions will profoundly change our habits and the way we use digital services. So it’s a safe bet that AI startups represent the future of our sector.

Many applications and services using artificial intelligence will accelerate productivity, support creativity and improve our comfort of life. These impacts will transform habits of  both businesses and individuals. Scaleway wants to support these innovations that will shape our future.

In order to grow, these AI startups need:

• technical skills with highly qualified staff
• to raise considerable funds, because training and running LLMs is expensive
• to secure computing power with accessible compute products, within a resilient and secure architecture.

The good news is that the stars of European AI already rely on Scaleway! Mistral used our GPU cluster to train one of its models; and Parisian startup H Company, which recently raised $220 million in seed, will launch thanks to our AI compute capacity (the European cloud’s largest, by the way!)

This is why it makes perfect sense that Scaleway has partnered with Meta, alongside Hugging Face, to create the very first startup program dedicated to open source artificial intelligence last year. During 6 months of incubation at Station F in Paris, Scaleway supported the selected startups - all drawn from the vibrant French ecosystem - by providing the necessary infrastructure resources for their development, including computing power and technical expertise.

It’s always very exciting to follow the evolution of the five startups we picked from a lot of applications - because we believed we could support them to go from A to B during their  time in the program - and actually witness their evolution gains in maturity over six months.

Scaleway is working closely with three of the five selected startups from the last round. Here's why I'm keeping a particularly close eye on what each of them is doing:

• Fringuant, a retailtech startup, aims to revolutionize e-commerce in fashion, by allowing users to find and buy clothes that match their body shape. Uploading a simple arm's-length selfie via a mobile phone gives a precise estimation of your body measurements, so you can then select and buy clothes in the right sizes. Fringuant significantly reduces the costs linked to product returns and encourages an increase in overall sales.

• Jimini AI, which raised €1.9m in seed funding at the end of 2023, is a legaltech startup. Researching, analyzing and drafting legal documents are tedious and time-consuming tasks. Thanks to generative artificial intelligence, Jimini offers a platform intended for legal professionals in order to relieve them and save them time with these boring tasks.

• Toongether (by Kartoon.ai) puts creativity at everyone's fingertips, enabling AI to bring stories to life. This startup offers storytellers, artists and content creators the possibility, via an application, of creating their own digital comic strip or webtoon. Toongether is the tool that makes it easy to unleash your creativity to bring exciting stories to life in a format popular with Gen-Z.

Continuing the success of this first edition dedicated to French AI startups, Scaleway is once again partnering with Meta for the launch of the second edition of the AI Accelerator Program, with a broader and ambitious objective: supporting the entire continental AI ecosystem, by opening applications to all startups based in the European Union. It’s an amazing opportunity to discover new European projects and startups, tomorrow’s champion, and giving them the best chances to succeed in this booming AI ecosystem.

Meta has surrounded itself with the same historical partners - Hugging Face, Scaleway, Station F and HEC Incubator - to select and support five European startups for four months of acceleration, in order to accompany them in the adoption of open source AI solutions for their services.

As mentioned by Yann LeCun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta, during the AI Open Source Day at Station F at the end of June 2024, progress in AI has been dazzling over the last 10 years, because the community has understood that everything must be supported by open source. 

Open source models offer many advantages in terms of control, cost, deployment, portability and greater ease of customization which is the big advantage. When you create a startup, it is much easier to fine-tune an OS model than to do it with an OpenAI model.

Innovation and open source are anchored in Scaleway's values, and as the leading provider of AI computing power of the European cloud, it was obvious that Scaleway has a role to play today, to foster the success of tomorrow’s AI startups. I can’t wait to see what this new round of startups will come up with in terms of innovation. 

So I can guarantee you: this won’t just be any old startup competition!

Startups, feel free to apply here: you have until August 16…