The year of the French unicorns

In September 2019 , President Emmanuel Macron will finish up a speech on late-stage financial investment in France. According to a press rundown and some conversations with a source, whatever that he was expected to reveal had actually been revealed.

But he dropped an unforeseen number. “ I ’ ll leave you with an objective: there ought to be 25 French unicorns by 2025, ” Macron stated. A unicorn is a personal business with an evaluation of $1 billion or more.

When you point out France in a discussion with immigrants, they put on’ t right away think of start-ups. In December 2018, I covered a two-day roadshow of the French tech community with 40 partners of worldwide equity capital companies, along with restricted partners, from Andreessen Horowitz to Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and more.

The very same clichs turned up once again and once again — taxes, labor law, long lunches … You call them. It doesn’ t matter if those clichs hold true or not (tip: They aren’ t), the French tech community has actually been prospering. When it comes to reaching unicorn status and raising late-stage rounds of financing, and 2019 has actually been an exceptional year.

A brand-new group of unicorns

According to a current report from VC company Atomico, there are 11 unicorns in France. A few of them have actually been around for many years, such as BlaBlaCar (a ride-sharing market for far away flights), OVHcloud (a cloud hosting business), Deezer (a music streaming service) and Veepee (an e-commerce business previously referred to as Vente-privee. com).

But in 2019 alone, a handful of business have actually reached unicorn status. Here are a couple of examples.