Essays
all →Journal
all →Newsletter.exe #20 is out. This one started as our LP letter — we decided to make it public. Full state of tech, AI, and VC markets going into 2026, including our 91-slide LPAC deck, open-sourced for the ecosystem.
Inside: AI’s industrialisation paradox (capability 2x in 2024, compute capex past $200bn, yet deployment lags). Global VC’s bifurcated recovery ($512bn deployed, but strip out AI mega-rounds and it’s flat). French Tech’s seed choke point (only major ecosystem to decline — seed collapsed 38%). Plus three deep dives on molecular farming, first AI-designed molecule reaching Phase IIa, and the crack in the $80B+ SEO market.
The 2025 French Tech Ecosystem Report by 20VC x Overlooked is out. €2.9bn deployed into AI startups in 2025 (+50% YoY), now 43% of total French VC funding.
What stands out: France has built something unique outside the US and China — a genuine ecosystem of foundation models across modalities. Mistral (multi-modal), Genesis (robotics), Gradium (voice), Owkin/AQEMIA/Raidium (biology). The talent density is real: OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Manus, and Sierra all opened Paris offices in 2024-25.
The honest take: the bull case is compelling, but no French AI company has yet achieved the $1M→$100M ARR trajectory in under 36 months that we’ve seen elsewhere in Europe.
Where I’m paying attention: application layers (Jimini, Dust, Contrast, Dialog), infrastructure and tooling (HuggingFace, Alpic, 2501, Linkup), and most of all critical industries — healthcare, defence, plant biology, materials, computing, robotics. This is where France is producing potential global AI leaders.
Reports like this one matter. Producing rigorous data and insights is how you strengthen a tech ecosystem.
The more I read about energy transition, the more I think the real constraint on AI isn’t compute — it’s watts. We’re building cathedrals of intelligence on foundations of coal.
“The purpose of a system is what it does.” — Stafford Beer. This applies to LLMs too: stop asking what they “understand,” watch what they produce.
Fascinating conversation with a founder building AI agents for due diligence. The real unlock isn’t speed — it’s exhaustiveness. Humans skip pages. Agents don’t.