I'll say it plainly: I'm worried about our ecosystem.
The slowdown we're seeing is partly cyclical, and the reflex is to wave it off. I think that reflex is wrong. Twenty-five years of patient construction can be undone in eighteen months — and three of the pillars holding up French tech are visibly under strain right now.
What follows is a diagnosis from someone who has spent the past decade building, investing, and sitting on boards inside this ecosystem. I'd rather get it wrong by being too alarmist than be silent while the foundations move.
The six pillars
A startup ecosystem isn't a market. It's a system — six interdependent pillars, each one reinforcing the others. Pull on any one of them too hard, and the whole structure starts to tilt.
1. Founders & talent
France's engineering schools and universities continue to produce extraordinary technical and entrepreneurial profiles. The grandes écoles remain a competitive advantage we underestimate. Entrepreneurship programmes are now embedded in most curricula. This pillar is solid. Not perfect — we still lose too many top engineers to the US — but solid.
2. Industry associations
France Digitale and La French Tech let the ecosystem speak with a single voice. They represent us in front of regulators, organise the calendar, and project French tech internationally. They aren't perfect, but they exist, they function, and they're recognised. Most ecosystems would kill for what we have here.
⚠3. Capital
Here is where the first crack appears.
Bpifrance has been an extraordinary force-multiplier — €60bn in assets, €8 to 10bn deployed each year. Combined with French VCs that have reached genuine European critical mass, the financing pillar has been the engine of the past decade. It is now politically vulnerable.
The economic and political situation in France is putting Bpi's future contribution at real risk. Budget cuts, mandate changes, capital reallocation — none of these are confirmed, but all of them are now plausible scenarios for 2026 and beyond. Take Bpi out of the equation and the European VC critical mass we've built doesn't compensate. Not yet.
4. Identity — venues and events
Station F. VivaTech. The places where startups and large groups physically run into each other. These institutions give French tech an identity — visitors leave with a feeling, not just a stack of business cards. That feeling matters more than any policy paper. This pillar is intact, and it's one of the things I describe most often when I'm explaining French tech abroad.
⚠5. Corporates
The second crack.
Large French corporates publicly state they buy more than €1bn of startup solutions per year, and acquire startups regularly. That has been a real engine — both for revenue and for exits. It is grinding to a halt.
The economic conditions of the country have made corporates dramatically more risk-averse since late 2024. Innovation budgets have been frozen or cut. CIO and CTO offices are being told to focus on core business, on margin, on cost-out. I've watched advisory engagements with large French groups stall not because the case for innovation is weak, but because nobody internally has the political capital to push it through right now.
A corporate buyer base that goes quiet for eighteen months will reshape the unit economics of every B2B startup that depends on the French enterprise market.
⚠6. Politics
The third crack — and the one that worries me most, because it conditions all the others.
The national tools — CIR, BSPCE, JEI — have built France an extraordinary fiscal stack for entrepreneurs. Few countries match it. But there is almost nothing comparable at the regional or municipal level. The Paris municipality, in particular, has been remarkably absent from the conversation in recent years.
And what about Europe? The dissolutions, the recurring political crises, the absence of a clear narrative — France no longer carries the European tech conversation the way it did between 2017 and 2022. We've lost the red thread.
Why this matters now
Look at the three weakened pillars together:
- Bpi could face budget cuts — capital supply contracts
- Corporates have become deeply risk-averse since end of 2024 — and I see no reason that improves on the short term
- Political instability won't resolve before 2027 at the earliest
Each one of those, on its own, would be manageable. The problem is that they reinforce each other. Less Bpi means less risk-tolerance from co-investors. Quieter corporates means fewer acquisitions, which means harder exits, which means harder fundraises. Political fog means corporates stay on the sidelines longer.
An ecosystem takes years to build, and can be weakened in a quarter or two.
What founders should actually do about it
I'm not writing this as a complaint. I'm writing it because the founders I work with need to make decisions in this environment, not the one we'd like to be in. Three things, concretely.
Don't plan around French enterprise revenue alone.
If your B2B GTM assumes that CAC LVMH, BNP, Total, Engie and the rest of the CAC 40 will be your beachhead in 2026, build a Plan B before you commit. Many of those doors that were welcoming in 2023 are politely closed now. Look at mid-market. Look at international. Look at corporates outside France.
Diversify your funding base early.
The French VC scene is excellent, but it's no longer enough on its own. Build relationships with Greek, Spanish, Italian, German VCs. Look at US seed and Series A funds with European mandates. Don't wait until your bridge round to discover that French capital alone doesn't get you there.
Build proximity to the geographies that are accelerating.
I've spent the past months across Miami and Buenos Aires. There are ecosystems in motion right now — places where founders are being forged differently, where capital is moving in, where doors are open. Being a French founder in 2026 doesn't mean being only French. It means having one foot in the geographies where momentum is real.
The bigger picture
An ecosystem takes a generation to build. It can be fragilised in eighteen months.
I want to be clear: this isn't a defeatist piece. The first three pillars — talent, associations, identity — are real and they're durable. France remains, by some distance, one of the best places in Europe to start a tech company. That has not changed.
What has changed is that we've moved out of the easy decade. The decade where Bpi grew, corporates bought, and politics largely stayed out of the way. The next two to three years will reward founders who plan for the harder version of France — and ecosystems builders who refuse to take the existing pillars for granted.
I'd rather we look squarely at what's cracking now than pretend the foundations are still intact. What do you think?