STATION F Future 40, picked by people, not AI
Thirty of the 40 startups on this list have a founder who has done it before. Fifteen have a founder who already sold a company.
The list is Future 40, published every November since 2019 by STATION F, the Paris campus Xavier Niel founded in 2017. This year's 40 come from more than 1,000 startups on campus. Together they have raised €110M, including €28M for Arlequin AI.
How they get picked: Camille Aubery, an investor at STATION F, told Tech.eu that selecting them is "the one thing we don't want AI to do." Every application is reviewed twice, because some founders present better than others. Traction counts, and so do global ambition and how involved a team is in campus life.
The campus also has its own money in this. STATION F has invested in selected Future 40 companies since 2022. Corporate partners shop there too: Aubery says TotalEnergies buys up to four companies a year from the campus. Past Future 40 companies have been bought by Mistral and Hugging Face.
Two more numbers from this year's list. Six of the 40 went through Y Combinator and came back to France. Five are bootstrapped, though two of those are now raising.
Then the headline figure. Companies across the STATION F ecosystem raised a record €2B in 2026, up from more than €1.5B in 2025. Multiverse Computing with €500M and Alan with €480M make up almost half of it.
Aubery also names the gap: "We still lack liquidity and sufficient late-stage capital."