Recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't even have a product | Hacker News Reader

Recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't even have a product

theregister.com

36 pointsbelter16 comments

This is not irrational FOMO from investors, it is the reality that to get up and running with a competitively trained model from scratch you need to spend millions. Software startups have traditionally not been very capital intensive, but clearly that doesn't apply to ML startups. Yes, you could have given a smaller seed and asked them to develop a POC, but with their credentials, I don't think their ability to deliver on that is really in doubt. The real question is whether they can create something on the scale of competing with OpenAI. I think that is a pretty good investment thesis, even if it is risky.

> AI

Ah okay, nevermind - thought it would be interesting. Hype generates crazy amounts of money, yes. Usually hyped products and ideas turn out to be at least 50% hot garbage, so its not like "b-b-but this is the next big thing!!!" is a good argument

Instead of training off of reddit and stormfront they mught try Viz and Paris Match. At least the output will be beautiful gowns and Roger Mellie.

I imagine this will be about as successful as Arianespace vs SpaceX

Is SpaceX a successful business or just subsidized? Arianespace, from what I can see, makes a very modest profit.

"Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies" - https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...

For comparison the Ariane 6 generation, is funded in a public-private partnership with the majority of the funding coming from various ESA government sources — €2.815 billion — while €400 million from industry

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_6

Even if I take your comment at face value (even though it’s a misrepresentation of government help):

What exactly has arianespace achieved vs spacex? For almost the same amount of money?

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ariane_launches

"Rockets from the Ariane rocket family have accumulated 259 launches since 1979, 247 of which were successful, yielding a 95.4% success rate. The currently operational version, Ariane 5, has flown 82 consecutive missions without failure between April 2003 and December 2017"

https://www.arianespace.com/

"Arianespace reported revenue of 1.25 billion euros ($1.4 billion) in 2021, an increase of 30% over 2020. The company did not disclose its profitability for the year, but Israël described the year as “break-even.”" - https://spacenews.com/arianespace-looks-to-transitions-of-ve...

> "We just need to demonstrate how beneficial it will be, for once, to be in control of our own destiny in terms of technology in Europe,"

This wont be it though.

Most companies raising a seed round don't have a fully fledged out product, if they have a product at all. Really much ado about nothing here.

Yes, but this is not that typical. Macron being on stage with them is impressive. There’s a lot of optics being engineered around this.

I can't help but to think it's a complete "me too" play.

Realistically, these guys will have to fight an uphill battle for talent. Dev comp in France is nowhere competitive with the US, and won't provide employees with a green card.

For smart graduates coming from the Polytechnique in Paris or Montreal or Lausanne, it'll be a hard sell compared to Bay area companies.

They won't compete on salary, there's probably plenty of talented people who simply do not want to live in the US due to the work culture, especially French workers. 35 hour work week with 6 weeks of paid vacation is worth a lot I imagine.

The thing is, there aren't a lot of French-speaking ML experts on the market.

So they'll have to pay a premium for them.

When heads of state are involved you already won.

They dont have to do anything, they already got the money :) and will get sweet government/eu contracts/grants no matter what for at least couple of years.

if it had a product, it would'n't be seed funding

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