It’s no secret that Sam Altman’s brainchild, OpenAI, disrupted the world with the launch of ChatGPT. Now, the US-based AI chatbot firm is reportedly gearing up for a new funding round that could push its valuation to a staggering $100 billion. While the US leads the charge in generative AI, a new report from top venture capital firm Accel and analysts at Dealroom shows a wave of hopefuls emerging across Europe and Israel, eager to make their mark.
The report revealed that, out of more than 350 VC-backed unicorns in the region, 248 have spawned 1,451 new tech-enabled startups, with many former employees becoming founders. However, while Europe and Israel traditionally secured about 45% of all venture funding annually, their share in the AI sector is noticeably lower.
Although London has generated the highest number of GenAI startups, but France, for example, is currently at the forefront of generative AI funding in Europe. To date, French startups focused on generative AI have raised $2.29 billion—the most of any country in Europe, surpassing even Israel.
With this backdrop, TFN decided to dive deeper to highlight the hottest funding rounds contributing to this evolving field and uncover what these companies are working on.
Mistral AI
Founder/s: Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothee Lacroix
Founded year: 2023
Total funding: $1.1B
This French unicorn Mistral AI, Mistral AI stands out in developing language models. Emerging advanced models can perform translation, summarisation, and even creative writing. One of the characteristics that sets Mistral AI apart from the rest is that it follows the open-source development model, allowing other members of the research and developer communities across the globe to contribute to and enhance their models. This model has helped to breed an innovative community that has hastened up the rate at which this innovation occurs.
In 2024, Mistral AI attracted €468 million in funding led by new investor DST Global and existing backer General Catalyst. With this, the company founded by DeepMind and Meta alumni reached a valuation of $5.8 billion
H Company
Founder/s: Charles A. Kantor, Karl Tuyls, Laurent Sifre, Daan Wierstra, Julien Perolat
Founded year: 2024
Total funding: $200M
A relatively newer company – H Company (H) emerged from stealth mode with the ambition to develop a new generation of AI models. H distinguishes itself from existing AI companies by focusing on “agentic” AI, also referred to as “action-oriented” AI. These models go beyond simply processing information and aim to reason, plan, and collaborate to complete tasks and solve problems. The company believes these “foundational action models” will revolutionise entire industries and ultimately bring us closer to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
A few months back, the agentic AI company raised $220 million in seed funding. The backers included Accel, UiPath Inc., Bpifrance, through its Large Venture fund, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Amazon, FirstMark, Elaia Partners, Eurazeo, Yuri Milner, Bernard Arnault’s Aglaé Ventures, Creandum, Motier Ventures, Samsung, and Visionaries Club among others.
Hugging Face
Founder/s: Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf
Founded year: 2016
Total funding: $396M
Hugging Face democratises AI by providing a central hub for developers, researchers, and businesses. The company was initially built as a chatbot app targeted at teenagers but shifted its focus towards creating a platform for creating, testing, and deploying machine learning. It offers data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like hub for AI code repositories, models, and datasets. It offers a vast repository of pre-trained machine learning models, datasets, and tools, making it easier to build and deploy AI applications. The platform’s user-friendly interface and extensive community support have made it a go-to resource for AI enthusiasts worldwide.
So far in 2024, Hugging Face secured $235 million in Series D funding at a valuation of $4.5 billion. The investment came from Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, and Salesforce. Ashton Kutcher-backed venture capital firm Sound Ventures also participated in the round.
Stonal
Founder/s: Michel Tolila, Jean-Maurice Oudot
Founded year: 2017
Total funding: $132M
The AI-powered proptech startup Stonal works with the mission to deliver data quality at scale for asset owners and investors. Its collaborative AI-powered platform extracts information from documents and blueprints, creating an accurate and up-to-date database of buildings open to stakeholders such as property managers, surveyors, and insurers. Stonal launched its proprietary StonalGPT, the first generative AI solution designed for real estate owners and investors, establishing itself as one of the pioneers in this field.
In May this year, the data management platform for real estate owners and investors in Europe snapped €100 million in funding from Aareon.
Poolside AI
Founder/s: Jason Warner, Eiso Kant
Founded year: 2023
Total funding: NA
Based in Paris, Poolside.ai is a generative AI company that alters the reality of the world of software development. The basic premise is that by using AI of a high level, it is possible to create an effective platform aimed at maximising the efficiency of the coding work. Its technologies enable software engineers to write code faster, better, and more creatively.
One of Poolside AI’s main products is a base language model oriented towards software engineering. The model has been designed to abstract away user-generated software and therefore understands lower-level programming concepts and can write code snippets, function definitions, or even applications when provided with a textual description. This saves a lot of time which would have been used in planning and writing scripts, and gives room for the developers to think big and create.
A few months back, Poolside AI bagged $400 million in funding at a valuation of $2 billion. Before that, the company raised a $126 million investment. Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) and DST backed the latest funding round.
Nabla
Founder/s: Martin Raison, Delphine Groll, Alex Lebrun
Founded year: 2018
Total funding: $42.7M
An AI assistant for practitioners – Nabla streamlines the process of writing patient notes for medical professionals. By automating the transcription and summarisation of doctor-patient interactions, its Copilot saves doctors valuable time that can be better spent providing direct patient care. Its key benefit is the ability to maintain accuracy in clinical notes. Nabla claims that less than 5% of Copilot-generated notes need major revisions. In addition, it helps healthcare organisations maintain compliance with data privacy regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR.
Earlier this year, the company snapped $24 million in a Series B funding round led by Cathay Innovation alongside ZEBOX Ventures. This investment enables Nabla to boost expansion across US healthcare systems and continue transforming the way providers deliver care with its ambient AI assistant.
Dust
Founder/s: Stanislas Polu, Gabriel Hubert
Founded year: 2023
Total funding: $22M
Yet another startup in this segment is Dust, which specialises in building custom AI assistants to speed up work. Its custom AI assistants enhance productivity and streamline workflows across various professional domains. Its team designs and deploys specialised AI assistants that integrate deeply with a company’s knowledge and processes. While it helps teams to collaborate more effectively, it saves costs considerably.
In June this year, the company secured $16 million in a funding round led by Sequoia with participation from investors like XYZ, GG1, Connect Ventures, Seedcamp, and Motier Ventures.
Omi
Founder/s: Hugo Borensztein, Paul Borensztein
Founded year: 2020
Total funding: $21M
GenAI visual content production startup from Paris, Omi empowers brands to model a product in 3D and instantly create ultra-realistic photos and videos, removing the need for physical productions. Its unique end-to-end product positioning enables product brands to streamline their imagery workflows and accelerate time to production, pair creative freedom with control over brand identity, and distribute their content and drive performance across all their channels using a single app. The company also unveiled a new ‘Generative Videos’ feature, which gives brands enhanced creative control over their product visuals.
In June, Omi secured €13 million in Series A funding led by Dawn Capital alongside participation from Founders Future and notable angel investors, including Paul Robson, former International President at Adobe.
