Hottest tech startups in France | Hacker News Reader

Hottest tech startups in France

uk.businessinsider.com

65 pointscarlchenet36 comments

Other than blablacar, EVERYTHING in that list is about either entertainment or solving non-existing issues for privilaged class (like organizing URLs), can we ACTUALLY go ahead and solve real problems or does that not attract VC funding?

EDIT: The above statement is based on an assumption that the list in the article is legit, I don't know anything about French startups to reflect on the entire scene

I agree, the only that deserves to be there is probably blablacar. It's a startup, it's innovative, it's getting real traction.

Other than that, it's a mix between established companies that are no longer a startup: Dailymotion (older than Youtube), Gameloft (built on the Guillemot/Ubisoft empire) Vente Privée (15 years old) and unoriginal companies that probably won't be there in a couple years.

It's less about funding and more about what Business Insider wants to cover.

Remember, the French government is essentially an angel investor if you're trying to solve hard problems.

For an example of what BI missed, Brodlist is a French startup that is a new query language on a new type of database: simpler than SQL but with NoSQL scaling and performance.

Most of those aren't startups anymore by anyone's metrics. France has both a culture and systemic problem towards startups. It's been made abundantly clear to me when having a chat with UK and US people at conferences such as dot[0] that the environment here is quite hostile and successfully launching requires either solid government backing or a great amount of courage. Probably why everytime some news outlet here wants to talk about startups, each one of them hover way above ~5M€ turnover and 30+ employees.

Here's[1] what I consider being one of the genuine french startups that recently launched and tries to be useful (although aimed at the tech crowd).

[0]: http://www.dotconferences.eu

[1]: https://scalingo.com

Well, dropbox, uber etc. are called startups too. Maybe there is a massive word abuse, but it's not only about france :-)

http://www.chauffeur-prive.com/ looks good also, basically blablacar/uber with a professionalism USP: sounds good to me, but I'm concerned about range! I fly to Paris from China tomorrow evening with wife and daughter, and don't want to deal with maybe-late-sorry-phonetag ride-sharing. We want to go long distance between towns semi-frequently, and are happy to pre-book and pay a slight premium. If they had English and a map showing coverage across the country they'd more likely get our business. The first hit on a test search on blabla car was a 27 year old single male with an overpriced/overpowered car giving away free rides ... not the right image.

http://www.capitainetrain.com is a French startup (IIRC?) that does something more substantial than organising URLs

I think that French startup is worth mentioning: http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/sigfox-raises-115m-to-take-...

It's a low power high range network for IoT, when in place it could help a lot of people

1-page article: http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-17-hottest-tech-startups-i...

There's a "view as one page" link on the first page of the article.

Thanks, changed from http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-17-hottest-tech-startups-i....

I would have included algolia. They do site search and query auto-completion algorithms, with a very clean API.

Interestingly the search on HN is powered by algolia :)

+1 for Algolia

What?? Quantic Dreams, Gameloft, Deezer are not startups anymore, and have not been for a LONG time. And I would not qualify Quantic Dream as "tech startup" in the first place, it's a video game company, which falls in a very different category. And if you start including Quantic Dreams, why not include Nadeo, Arkane Studios, etc... most of which are not startups either anymore.

Same for Vente Privee (founded in 2001).

> If you've ever organised a gift for someone in the office, you know how tricky it is to get everyone to pay up. Leetchi solves that problem by allowing users to create a money pot. Friends and coworkers can use Leetchi to contribute to the pot through an app on their smartphones.

Wow, and they raised $7.9 millions for that! WTF?

They run Mangopay, a payment processor.

I hope BlaBlaCar insisted on getting their funding in pounds... """The company raised $100 million (£683 million) in new funding in July 2014"""

On Leetchi: If you've ever organised a gift for someone in the office, you know how tricky it is to get everyone to pay up.

I can think of a very easy solution - don't force anyone to pay. Buy a gift to the value of the money that people volunteer to put in. If you work in an business of 30 people, and everyone has to chip in $5 every time there's a birthday, that's effectively garnishing everyone's wages to the tune of $150/year. That should be a choice. If it isn't then your company is likely a horrible place to work.

Alternatively, just have the CEO organise the collection and watch everyone pay up immediately.

Either way, you don't need an app.

Why are you assuming it's a top-down thing from the organization? It certainly isn't with us.

And the problem isn't forcing everyone to pay, it's getting everyone who agreed to pay to follow up with it after the thing has actually been bought.

That said, I'm not sure we need an app either.

I would have included Drivy, which has recently raise $8.6m and acquired Buzzcar (a concurrent). [Peer to peer car sharing]

Other than that I would be curious to know how that list compare to other country/state.

Edit : and also capitainetrain, which have raise $6.3m. [Buy train ticket]

I guess that capitainetrain is too much "France-centric" to be listed on businessinsider, despite it being a really clean product.

I used to work at Sketchfab, which is another really interesting french startup which raised a few millions in the last past year (plus, they work with pretty cool technologies). Incidentally, I think that they are currently hiring.

Concurrent --> competitor

Thanks.

Such a shame that Capitaine Train is not present in this list. They have an excellent product (with an amazing UX), solving a real problem (ordering train tickets online used to be a pain in the arse) and with a vision (unifying the European railway).

A lot of these companies are old, some were founded in 2007, 1999 and one is even from 1994.

Start ups, really?

I am surprised http://www.bimeanalytics.com/ is not on there. After doing a lot of research and seeing a lot of demos in self serve BI it seems like one of the best products out there. Their pricing is also a game changer.

TIL Withings is french and realize the name comes from Wi-Fi and Things… And I still don't know if it should be pronounced Wee-things (Because, you know, we call it Wee-Fee here), or Why-things…

To me "Withings" sounded like an English surname featuring "wi" as in "with" and a voiced dental fricative "th" (like in "though"). Like "Witherspoon" or similar. It didn't even cross my mind it could by "wy-things" or "wee-things".

OVH?

A 16-year-old company with 17 datacenters and 800+ employees is hardly a startup anymore.

Yeah, include bookmarking website (lol) and other junk, and don't include real businesses like AT Internet and Viadeo.

Wouldn't really consider Viadeo as a startup anymore.

Well, then neither are most of the companies included. Parrot was founded in '94. Even their drone division is 8 years old.

Tech startups in France are hard. A friend had one that delivered soap and shower gel. Not one customer!

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