In a world where information is both a strategic asset and a persistent threat, Arlequin AI has emerged as Europe’s answer to digital-age chaos. On June 11, 2025, the Paris-based startup secured a €4.4 million seed round led by Vsquared Ventures, with participation from 10x Founders, Kima Ventures, Better Angle, and leading French business angels, including former Meta executives and prominent figures in finance and technology.
The funding will enable Arlequin to double its R&D team, accelerate on-premise integrations, and expand across Europe and beyond. Maria Juesas Portelés, Venture Partner at Vsquared Ventures, emphasises:
“We live in an era where information has become a currency, just like disinformation. Arlequin combines world-class technological expertise with a unique understanding of today’s geopolitical and strategic challenges. It’s precisely the kind of sovereign technology Europe needs to safeguard its independence and navigate through information chaos.”
How Arlequin AI confronts the information crisis
Arlequin AI was founded in 2024 by Hugo Micheron, a globally recognised authority on radicalisation and systemic risk, and Antoine Jardin, a research engineer and architect of France’s National AI Research Plan. They have assembled a multidisciplinary team of over twenty researchers, engineers, data scientists, and analysts to build the next generation of sovereign European data operations platforms.
The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risk Report underscores this urgency by ranking disinformation among the top short-term threats to global stability. By 2028, public and private actors are projected to invest over $500 billion in technologies to detect, counter, and contain hostile content, highlighting the scale of the challenge Arlequin addresses.
Beyond black boxes: Instant, auditable intelligence
Arlequin’s platform marks a radical departure from mainstream AI approaches. Built on proprietary, unsupervised AI models that avoid large language models (LLMs), prompts, and pre-trained datasets, it operates transparently with a fully sovereign and auditable technological pipeline. In seconds, the platform delivers certified, unbiased, and immediately actionable insights from massive, unstructured, multilingual data streams.
The system rapidly transforms raw, unstructured, multilingual data into structured, labelled, and actionable outputs. It maps narratives and actors, discovers and ranks signals of any intensity, filters noise, generates reports, models data, and supports decision-making. Organisations can now replace guesswork with intelligent, data-driven action and understand public opinion dynamics with unprecedented clarity.
CEO Hugo Micheron explains: “If Europe wants to lead in AI, it must step out of the shadow of American and Chinese giants and pursue its strategy. At Arlequin, we’re not building another LLM; we’re developing comprehension models that need no training data and are highly resource-efficient. By cutting across the field, we achieve breakthrough innovations faster and at a fraction of the cost. This funding will accelerate our platform’s deployment and strengthen Europe’s technological independence.”
CTO Antoine Jardin adds: “Our models work like a medical imaging scanner: you input the data, and it reveals its natural structure, giving users instant access to the underlying strategic information.”
Adoption and impact across Europe
Arlequin’s technology operates in three European countries, serving ministries, government agencies, public and private media (including Radio France), and major corporations such as BNP Paribas Group. In June 2025, Arlequin powered the first comprehensive online data processing of the Grand Débat National, delivering real-time mapping of public debate and information flows.
The platform’s hybrid public/private model and user-friendly interface welcome non-engineers and adapt across sectors: financial services (trend and risk detection, fraud prevention, due diligence), healthcare, energy and environment (demand forecasting, reputation analysis), logistics (supply chain management, disruption forecasting), e-commerce and marketing (personalisation, segmentation), manufacturing, and insurance (underwriting, fraud detection).
Arlequin is forging research partnerships with Princeton University, the University of Santa Barbara, INRIA, and Sciences Po, cementing its position at the intersection of technological innovation and academic rigour.
In a global AI landscape dominated by American and Chinese giants, Arlequin AI’s rise marks a bold step toward restoring trust, transparency, and strategic autonomy in Europe’s data-driven future. Through its sovereign, auditable, and instantly actionable intelligence platform, Arlequin isn’t merely responding to today’s information crisis — it’s actively shaping the future of European data sovereignty and resilience.
