FrenchTech is lying to itself.

Until late 2025, I had spent my entire career in London; and often got questioned around why I decided to build my career there, and not in my native Paris.

Over the years, I've often been told that France is a powerful country with a strong economy, good opportunities, and that Paris is attractive for startups. My love for London knows no bounds, but I always felt the people asking had a point. Paris has everything on paper: top universities, a G7 economy, good investor network. Framed like that, leaving sounds a bit mad.

Last year, I went through a quarter-life crisis, and decided to give Paris a shot. I was 27, had solid experience in London's startup scene, and Paris had a genuinely compelling pitch - a respected ecosystem, competitive comp for senior roles, all in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything went wrong. Every. Thing.

A few months later, I'm back in London, more convinced than ever that this is where I belong - not out of habit, but because going back to Paris gave me some clarity I didn't have before.

This piece is my honest take on the Paris startup ecosystem. No names, no company callouts. Just an assessment I think is defensible, specific, and one that many people in the ecosystem agree with but rarely say out loud.

I'll be covering three core components: the companies, the investors and the culture. And there's a single thread that runs through all of it: Paris' problems are structural. And it starts with who actually gets to win — and why.

Quick note: I worked as a consultant during my time in Paris rather than a direct employee, mostly due to logistics around moving from London. Nothing below is directed at any specific company or employer - these are entirely my own views.

FrenchTech successes are state-sponsored

The French startups scene was born in the late 2000s, and had its first major successes in the late 2010s - a period where VC money was cheap, SaaS was in its golden era, and any manual process or flow could be improved by software. Top companies were built in that era, some doing genuinely impressive things.

Before sharing any opinion on these companies, a distinction needs to be drawn, that rarely gets made when discussing the Paris ecosystem.

There are "true" French companies: founded, grown, and scaled in France. And there are "exported" French companies: born in France, but which only became what they are after relocating elsewhere.

True French companies include Doctolib, Sumeria (formerly Lydia), Qonto, BlaBlaCar and ManoMano. Exported ones include HuggingFace, Dataiku and Algolia - true powerhouses, that moved their HQs across the Atlantic to attract massive VC money, lure in global talent, and sell to Fortune 500 companies.

I'll be focusing on the true French companies, not to narrow the scope to better land my point, but because the exported ones simply aren't French companies anymore. When the vast majority of your equity is held by foreign entities, your HQ is in the U.S. and your key functions (engineering, sales, operations) are in America, you can't reasonably be labeled a French success story. You just can't.

Worth a brief mention here: Docker was founded in Paris by Solomon Hykes, a French-American engineer who studied at Epitech and built the early product in Paris. He got into YC and the rest is history. He's a genuinely impressive engineer, and Docker has had a generational impact on modern software infrastructure. But Docker left France too early to count - it's been built by a French-educated founder who found success in America. Let's give props where they're due; Docker is a generational company and a true success story; it's just not Made in France.

Back to the true French companies. Let me break them down for you if you're unfamiliar with what each does:

Doctolib is a healthcare booking platform, a beautiful SaaS that became the standard for patients and doctors across France. Sumeria (formerly Lydia) started as a P2P payment app before pivoting to neobanking. BlaBlaCar is a long-distance carpooling platform that found real product-market fit. Qonto is a business neobank whose product became so loved that opening an account essentially became a must have for any new French company. ManoMano is an eCommerce marketplace specialising in DIY and home improvement that scaled fast.

They're impressive on paper. Great companies, built by great teams. But we must state the obvious: almost all of them owe a significant part of their success to the French state.

Doctolib is the clearest example. France's healthcare system is primarily public; the state controls the hospitals, doctors and data infrastructure. Doctolib did not just build a great product, but also convinced that system to let them in. During Covid, the French government went further, selecting Doctolib as its national partner to manage vaccination appointments across the country. They essentially became a utility company for running healthcare infrastructure. That's not a startup success per se, but a government contract at national scale. This doesn't mean that Doctolib hasn't achieved anything, or didn't build a great product with a top team. But without state support, there's no Doctolib.

Qonto and Sumeria (formerly Lydia) tell a similar story. France has a highly regulated and tightly controlled financial services environment, and both companies benefitted from a deliberate government push to modernise its financial infrastructure and place Paris as a "post-Brexit fintech hub". Both are true successes, but largely state-engineered.

If you compare Qonto & Sumeria to Revolut, the UK's fintech powerhouse, the contrast is striking. Revolut didn't get a friendly regulatory environment at all, and spent over five years fighting for a UK banking license. Their revenue figures were questioned by auditors, they had to overhaul their share structure to satisfy regulators and spent over two years in a restricted mobilisation phase with a £50k deposit cap until eventually getting full approval in early 2026.

The process was brutal, but it "built" the company. When a startup has to earn its position instead of just inheriting it, it emerges structurally strong and more equipped to scale globally. Qonto's product is excellent, I have a Qonto account, and love it; but they grew in a different environment, and that gap shows in the numbers.

This pattern shows that the Paris ecosystem has actually excelled at modernising public services and heavily regulated industries. It's not nothing, as many countries have a hard time doing that, and the products built are often excellent. But it's a fundamentally different game from building disruptive global technology - and the ecosystem rarely makes that distinction.

The scale problem

Most Paris scene stakeholders, like founders, investors, politicians and journalists, celebrate unicorn valuations and funding rounds as proof of tech dominance. They're not the same thing.

A company can reach a billion-dollar valuation by being deeply embedded in French public infrastructure, and never compete on the global stage.

The numbers make this hard to ignore. Around 60% of Qonto's customers are in France. Around 60% of ManoMano's. Sumeria and Pennylane are closer to 95%. These aren't emerging companies that are trying to scale globally, but mature, late-stage businesses that have had every opportunity to push beyond French borders and largely haven't.

Compare that to what's happening across the Channel. Revolut scaled to over 80% of its customer base outside of the UK. Same story for Wise, Checkout.com, Skyscanner and Deliveroo.

This isn't a fair-weather comparison cherry-picked to make a point. The UK is a genuinely comparable market, with a similar GDP, population, and with a competitive talent pool. This divergence is a reflection of fundamentally different ambitions.

Most FrenchTech successes look impressive until you ask one simple question: how much of it would survive without…France? For too many of the ecosystem's poster children, the honest answer is: not much.

Mistral is being failed

Let's address Mistral AI.

They are technically extraordinary. Their focus on cheap, low-latency, open models landed quite well with large enterprises and governments, and their team is objectively world-class.

But Mistral has a problem that isn't of its own making: it has become a national sovereignty totem.

Macron mentions it all the time. Ministers cite it. It gets invoked in parliament anytime a MP is asking about France's role in the AI race. That political weaponisation damages Mistral's perception.

When your company is more associated with a head of state or country than with the product you've built, institutional investors are looking at a sovereignty vehicle rather than a long-term bet. Large funds care about ROI and aren't writing cheques for national pride.

If you ask a random engineer about OpenAI, they'll mention ChatGPT. Ask about Anthropic, they'll mention Claude. Ask about Google AI, they'll mention Gemini. Ask about DeepSeek, they'll mention…that it's a French lab. Mistral has published impressive research on high-efficiency attention mechanisms and sparse MoE architectures. Their work deserves to be the story; instead, the association with France is.

The French government and the investor class share responsibility for this. And it's a perfect introduction to the second structural problem, because the investors aren't just passive observers in this story.

French VCs don't care about impact

A note before diving in: this analysis focuses on early-stage investors (pre-seed, seed) and doesn't claim to be a "universal truth". I know great Paris-based founders coming from every background, and some French VCs do back genuinely promising companies. But patterns matter, and I believe the ones mentioned below are real.

Until late last year, I never worked with a French VC firm, and only dealt with UK or US VCs. Upon moving to Paris, I started working from a popular Parisian startup incubator known for "building unicorns". Initially excited about the journey ahead, the firm's priority became clear within days: get in, inflate the valuation, and get out.

Their model is to help a founder to build enough hype to raise a seed or Series A at an inflated multiple, collect the markup and move on. When chatting with founders, the partners clearly say out loud that "the company can be acquired or sold within two years".

Founders are typically vested for four years (four years with a one-year cliff) as a way to keep the founders focused on growing the company. For those not familiar with vesting schedule, the math is simple: if you leave in your first year, you lose your full equity share; you then "earn" your equity each month, until locking your full equity share after four years.

If a founder is encouraged to look for a way out of the company after two or three years, this beats the purpose of a vesting schedule, and they are fine with that. Partners hardly ever discuss building something that will change an industry in ten years, and have little patience for the long game.

There is almost no premium placed on deep technical foundations. All they care about is valuation, multiples, and ARR engineering.

What truly struck me while working from this incubator was how indifferent they were to technology. They couldn't care less that the founders don't actually understand the technology they were supposed to be building.

I met "AI founders" who had never written a line of code, had no idea what a terminal does and couldn't define a neural network. Their relationship to technology began and ended at the product roadmap slide in their deck. When I raised with a few analysts, no one saw that as a problem. What mattered in a founder was their GTM strategy, their LinkedIn presence, how many networking events they went to, whether they could get in front of the right people and sell to companies already in the VC's portfolio. Under this model, the most important thing in a founder is their ability to generate artificial ARR figures, engineering to look good for the next funding round.

This is a speculative model. Plain and simple.

It produces companies optimised for valuation events, not for genuine technological impact, and places a structural ceiling on what those startups can ever become. You can't build a generational technology company by treating engineers as a support function.

Compare that to what UK early-stage investors have been willing to back.

Wayve, a London-based AI company building end-to-end autonomous driving software, spent years in stealth research before releasing a public-facing product. They eventually raised over a billion dollars from Nvidia, Microsoft and SoftBank, partnered with Uber and Nissan, and they are now running live trials on London streets. Graphcore, founded in Bristol, spent years building a new type of processor, called an IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit) designed to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI compute, before the market caught up with their vision. DeepMind barely needs an introduction.

None of these companies were built on quick exits and manufactured ARR. They were built on the belief that the technology itself was the bet, and the payoff would be huge if you were patient enough to wait for it.

The Parisian early-stage ecosystem doesn't embrace this mindset. They keep complaining that all major players in tech are US or China-based, but their speculative, short-term focus is exactly what prevents powerhouses from emerging out of the Seine river banks.

The credentials trap

Let me call it out bluntly, the French startup ecosystem has a diversity problem - not a racial one, but one of social privilege masquerading as meritocracy.

Walk through the team pages of most top Paris VC firms and their portfolio startups, and something becomes hard to miss: nearly everyone comes from the same handful of Grandes Ecoles (elite French universities, like HEC, ESSEC, ESCP, Sciences Po, among others). This isn't a negligible detail, the MD of France Digitale even publicly acknowledged that Grandes Ecoles graduates form tight networks that are "hard for others to crack", and that being an alumnus of one of these schools gives you "direct, easier access to networks of decision-makers".

The issue isn't that these schools produce bad people. It's that they tend to produce a very specific type of persona: one that has grown up in a privileged environment (top business schools tend to offer little-to-no scholarships), been socialised into a particular way of presenting themselves, and who fits a recognisable attitude that French investors feel comfortable with.

Top school. Privileged background. Knows how to work a room. This is what gets rewarded, independent of whether the person has any meaningful technical depth.

Some Grandes Ecoles tend to produce genuinely elite engineers. The few Ecole Polytechnique grads I know easily sit in the S-tier of technical minds I've ever met. But the French market isn't the most attractive for Polytechnique graduates. French startup salaries are well behind what grads can earn in London, New York, SF or HK - or at large tech companies. As a result, many of them tend to leave abroad or go into big tech. What remains in the early-stage startup pool skews heavily towards business school providers, and that's what eventually gets funded.

In the UK, I worked with one of the sharpest engineers and most hardworking founders you can think of. A smart, devoted, kind person that was fully immersed in his vision. His technical depth is unheard of; walk next to his desk in the office, and you'll find a myriad of clever architectural diagrams, sketches and POCs that he loves to share and discuss with the whole team.

As technical as he is, you wouldn't tell that his only degree is a BSc in Geography, and that he taught himself to code in his early twenties; he specialised in robotics, published a number of research papers and earned everyone's respect through sheer ability and an extreme work ethic.

As sad as this sounds, he would simply not have had the same success in Paris.

His resume just didn't "fit the mold", and in the Paris early-stage startup scene, your resume matters more than most people are willing to admit. What's valued instead? Networking events, LinkedIn posts, funding round announcements, lunches with VC operatives, photos at the office. This is social engineering dressed up as startup culture. Substance is an afterthought.

In London, being a great engineer with experience as an individual contributor in top startup teams is a genuine competitive advantage when looking for capital. In Paris, it's just a nice-to-have.

But the VC playbook and the credential trap don't exist in a vacuum — they're symptoms of something deeper. The culture that shaped them is the same culture that makes building a true moonshot in Paris so difficult.

The French work culture prevents startup success

We need to discuss the structural reality of building a startup in France before getting to the culture - the two are inseparable.

France has one of the heaviest employer tax burdens in the developed world. For a senior hire paid €100k gross per annum, a US employer pays around €108k all-in. A UK employer pays around €115k. In France that same hire costs a founder roughly €145k - because employer social contributions sit at 40-45% of gross salary for senior profiles, covering state pensions, national health insurance, family allowances, unemployment insurance and mandatory private top-up health coverage.

We're talking about a 30% cost premium over London. On every single hire. From day one.

The math is brutal for early-stage startups. A French company with a €2 million seed round is burning 40 cents of every headcount euro directly into the state rather than into the product. An identically funded competitor in London or SF has a meaningfully longer runway and a larger team. Before a French startup sets up a repo, it's already playing catch-up.

But the tax burden is only half the story. The other half is what happens when a hire doesn't work out.

France doesn't allow at-will dismissal.

To let someone go, an employer must prove a "real and serious cause", backed by documented underperformance, formal warnings, and HR interviews conducted in a tightly regulated sequence. For economic layoffs, the bar is even higher: a startup must demonstrate severe financial distress or an existential restructuring need. Extending your runway by cutting burn isn't deemed a valid reason by French courts. Jurisprudence has been clear on that.

The vast majority of employee exits happen via a mutually agreed termination where the employer pays a statutory minimum severance plus a 40% social contribution tax on top of that severance. Senior members typically have a three month minimum notice period, during which full salary and employer taxes continue to accrue. Unilateral termination without following every procedural step to the letter exposes a startup to the labour court, where the default outcome heavily favours the employee.

In the UK and US, the picture is completely different. Notice periods range from none to a few weeks. There's no statutory severance obligation for most employees. Termination for performance reasons is legally straightforward. France is just a parallel universe.

For a startup, this creates a sword of Damocles over every hire. In an environment that demands agility, fast pivots, and constant prioritisation, French labour law makes it incredibly challenging to adjust your team as needed without serious legal and financial consequences. Startups thrive on flexibility. France makes flexibility expensive by design.

The 9-to-5 startup culture

The regulatory burden is real and indefensible. But this burden has created something far more damaging: the 9-to-5 startup culture.

In London, long hours weren't mandated in employment contracts, no micromanagement. They were the natural byproduct of a team that was deeply invested in what they were building. Not because they had no choice, but because the stakes felt real. Every team member wants to cash out this equity, wants their name associated with a success story, wants to build truly outstanding tech. They had true purpose behind their hard work.

Paris felt like another world.

Picture this. Pre-seed and seed stage founders - people who had bet their professional lives on their company - calling it a day at five or six. Employees heading out the moment the clock hit five. An empty office by seven, every evening. Founders mentioning "events to attend", "LinkedIn posts to write", "BPI (French sovereign fund) grants to chase". A founder I work with even had "Linkedinmaxxing" busy blocks in his calendar, and multiple "€9k BPI a aller chercher" (€9k BPI grant to chase) meetings while I was making a major push for a product release.

I want to be fair here - not all Paris startups are like that, and I'm not saying French people don't work hard. Many do, I know some which locked themselves in the office for 3 days for major sales/product pushes, only leaving for a run or groceries. True grind. But the pattern was consistent enough across enough companies and people, that I couldn't write it off as coincidence.

In five years working in London's early-stage startup scene, I never once saw the office empty by seven. Pizza at nine was a tradition in more than one place I worked.

And honestly, the incentive structure explains it.

An employee on a CDI in France cannot easily be fired, is guaranteed severance, has three months' notice, and can claim unemployment afterwards. The downside of not going all-in is limited.

London, New York or SF all have sky-high costs of living, no meaningful safety net, short notice periods and at-will employment. Working hard isn't an option there. That pressure, uncomfortable as it is, produces intensity. And intensity is what startups run on.

There's a compounding effect too. When teams work nine-to-five, founders compensate by hiring more people to maintain output. More people means more employer contributions, more legal exposure, shorter runway.

The equation gets worse with every hire.

Paris is blind to equity

Paris has an odd relationship with equity.

Equity is a startup's most powerful alignment tool. The traditional model, four-year vesting with a one-year cliff, directly ties an employee's financial upside to the company's success. Early teams at Stripe, Revolut or OpenAI became wealthy not because they were paid well, but because they bet on the outcome and stayed for it. That bet requires believing in the company, going above and beyond for it, understanding what equity means, and being willing to accept below-market cash in exchange for potential upside.

In Paris, I found that this contract simply didn't land.

When recruiting, the majority of candidates I spoke to were largely indifferent to equity, and instead negotiated hard for above-market salaries. Those willing to consider an equity package had, at best, a surface-level understanding of how it works. Upon signing his offer, a candidate sent a formal letter requesting to have the right to attend board meetings, under the impression that holding employee equity meant having voting power in the company.

This isn't a small thing, and speaks to a fundamental mismatch between the all-in, upside oriented mindset that startup culture runs on, and a cultural default that prizes security, guaranteed income, and stability over risk and reward. This default makes total sense given the broader French social contract, but it's deeply incompatible with what it takes to build something from nothing.

Startups built by all-in, equity-motivated teams accomplish extraordinary things. The story of Silicon Valley, and London in the past two decades, is built on that premise.

A culture that defaults to nine-to-five, treats equity as a curiosity, and measures success by funding round announcements and LinkedIn reach isn't going to produce the next tech giant. It will just produce more well-funded companies that are 95% France-dependent and exit in year three.

Closing Notes

My goal here was never to dunk on France.

On a personal level, Paris is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and I know genuinely exceptional people building there. High-performers. Elite founders. Superstar engineers. Great investors. Building great things in the city of lights.

I didn't write this piece to deter people from building in Paris. I wrote it out of frustration, because things could be so different.

France has everything on paper. A strong economy, world-class universities, attractive cities, deep integration with global capital markets. And yet, it keeps shooting itself in the foot. Too much government intervention, a speculative startup culture, social privilege dressed up as meritocracy, and a broader cultural disposition that simply isn't compatible with the cut-throat, all-in world of startups.

The honest truth is that I don't think these problems get solved in my lifetime.

Overhauling the French tax and regulatory system, breaking open the Grandes Ecoles closed networks, and fundamentally shifting the French talent pool's relationship with risk and reward aren't policy tweaks. They require a generational rewrite of the very fabric of French society. That's not pessimism. Just the scale of what would need to change.

What frustrates me most isn't the problems themselves, but the refusal to acknowledge them.

French newspapers and government officials would rather run mass-scale media campaigns pushing the "Paris is the top startup hub in Europe" narrative, built on selective data, inflated valuations, and a definition of success that conveniently excludes the global scale question.

London, New York and SF still rule, and will for a long time.

I've learned my lesson, and will keep building in the city by the Thames, grateful for living here, and quietly dreaming of a Silicon-sur-Seine that never quite arrived.