With yesterday’s announcement of Mistral AI’s acquisition of Emmi AI, the French decacorn’s second acquisition in three months, I am reminded of the unspoken, structural inertia holding back Japan’s venture ecosystem. Walk through the sleek tech hubs of Toranomon Hills or listen to the conference...
Last week Ecovadis announced its acquisition of Ulula, a human rights analytics platform. Ecovadis is an admirable company, one of France’s pioneering startups in sustainability analytics solutions, and now rapidly emerging as the gold standard for business ESG ratings. Ecovadis is also one of...
When the topic comes up of building the startup ecosystem in Japan, I like to tell the story of the French Innovation Renaissance. Some of you have heard the story before, but I’ll recap because it provides a valuable road map for Japan in its pursuit of its Startup Nation agenda Two decades ago,...
France shows no signs of throttling back its ambition to maintain one of the world’s most vibrant startup ecosystems. At the VivaTech conference in Paris last week, French president Emmanuel Macron announced an extension of TIBI, an initiative which successfully catalyzed $30 billion of funding...