Mistral, Doctolib, Voodoo… Who are the unicorns of French Tech?

The numbers are staggering. After just two years in business, French startup Mistral announced on Tuesday, September 9, that it had raised €1.7 billion. This artificial intelligence company notably designed the chatbot Le Chat, a competitor to ChatGPT. With this new round of funding, its valuation nearly doubles, reaching €11.7 billion .

Mistral thus joins the small circle of "decacorns," startups valued at more than ten billion euros. While these "super unicorns" remain rare, simple "unicorns," valued at more than one billion euros and not listed on the stock market, have sprung up like mushrooms in France over the past ten years.

BlaBlaCar started the ball rolling in 2015. The platform brought carpooling into the daily lives of the French, offering more attractive fares than the train and journeys in sometimes very isolated areas. The company has also diversified, for example, acquiring Ouibus, which became Blablabus, in 2019. The platform now boasts 29 million active users in 21 countries.

Shortly after, two start-ups little known to the general public joined the French unicorn club: OVH, an Internet service provider now listed on the stock exchange , and Actility, specializing in connected objects, mainly for manufacturers.

In 2019, Doctolib, already a leading online booking platform for medical appointments, also exceeded €1 billion in valuation. Covid-19 has allowed it to grow at an accelerated pace and reach a valuation of around €5.8 billion in 2022. Before its IPO, the music streaming platform Deezer was also among France's top unicorns.

At the end of the 2010s, when France had only a handful of start-ups valued at more than a billion euros, Emmanuel Macron set an initial target in this area: to reach 25 French "unicorns" by 2025. Paradoxically, the health crisis allowed this objective to be exceeded three years earlier than planned. Taking advantage of the good investment conditions offered by the accommodative policies of the European Central Bank and the Fed, funds invested massively in young French companies.

In 2022, after a €450 million funding round, Back Market became the highest-valued startup in French Tech, at €5.1 billion. While the future hasn't been as rosy for this "unicorn" specializing in the resale of refurbished electronics, the wild success of its fundraising demonstrates the enthusiasm of investors at the time.

Other French startups are benefiting from this, including Qonto, a company specializing in analyzing online behavior; Voodoo, a mobile video game publisher; and Ledger, which offers online wallets to secure crypto assets.

Unfortunately, the climate is no longer so favorable today. Some investors are turning away from "unicorns," which are rarely profitable and are accused of "burning cash" with their hypergrowth model. This could jeopardize the new goal set by Emmanuel Macron in June 2022: reaching 100 French unicorns by 2030.