For French Tech, Emmanuel Macron's global appeal a double-edged sword

When the founder of France’s Qwant search engine went to his local tax office to catch up on business, an agent there had to look up the firm using US rival Google. When she did, Qwant’s home page was blocked — by the government tax office’s firewall.
 
To Eric Leandri, the founder of Qwant, the episode illustrated a French paradox: startups are benefiting from President Emmanuel Macron’s support, but so are global tech giants, and competing with them is proving a problem.
 
“Can you imagine?” he told Reuters. “It just gives you an idea of how these people can’t see what’s in front of them.” Over the past few years, ‘French Tech’ has been catching up with regional leader Britain. France’s venture capital firms raised about 2.7 billion pounds last year, overtaking Britain’s 2.4 billion, according to Dealroom.

 

Macron, a 40-year-old former investment banker who styles himself as a champion of the tech-savvy youth, pledges to turn France into a “startup nation”. He has sought to redirect investment flows to improve funding for startups, made taxes more attractive and extended a tech visa programme to draw foreign expertise. And aggressive funding by France’s state investment bank is trying to push France’s traditional strengths in mathematics and engineering to nurture the sector.
 
At the same time, Macron wants to attract investment from tech leaders like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon — disparagingly referred to as “GAFAs” in French — and that is frustrating some French firms struggling to make a mark in the early days of Macron’s rule. For the founder of Snips, a Paris-based artificial intelligence startup developing an “Alexa killer” to take on Amazon’s voice assistant, big announcements made by US tech giants and hailed by Macron to open AI hubs in France left a bitter taste.