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The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, named F\/ai.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Station F announced it had partnered with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral, which it says marks the first time the firms are all participating in a single accelerator. Other partners include cloud and semiconductor companies AWS, AMD, Qualcomm, and OVH Cloud.<\/p>\n
An accelerator is effectively a crash course for early-stage startups, whereby founders attend classes and lectures, consult with specialists, and receive introductions to potential investors and customers. The broad aim is to help startups bring ideas to market as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n
The 20 startups in each F\/ai cohort will undergo a curriculum geared specifically toward helping European AI startups generate revenue earlier in their lifecycle, in turn making it easier to secure the funding required to expand into the largest global markets. \u201cWe\u2019re focusing on rapid commercialization,\u201d says Roxanne Varza, director at Station F, in an interview with WIRED. \u201cInvestors are starting to feel like, \u2018European companies are nice, but they\u2019re not hitting the $1 million revenue mark fast enough.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The accelerator will run for three months, twice a year. The first edition began on January 13. Station F has not revealed which startups make up the cohort, but many were recommended by Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, or one of the other VC firms involved in the program. The startups are all building AI applications on top of the foundational models developed by the partnering labs, in areas ranging from agentic AI to procurement and finance.<\/p>\n
In lieu of direct funding, participating founders will receive more than $1 million in credits that can be traded for access to AI models, compute, and other services from the partner firms.<\/p>\n
With very few exceptions, European companies have so far lagged behind their American and Chinese counterparts at every stage of the AI production line. To try to close that gap, the UK and EU governments are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at attempts to support homegrown AI firms, and develop the domestic data center and power infrastructure necessary to train and operate AI models and applications.<\/p>\n
In the US, tech accelerators like Y Combinator have produced a crop of household names, including Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and Reddit. OpenAI was itself established in 2015 with the help of funding from Y Combinator\u2019s then research division. Station F intends for F\/ai to have a similar impact in Europe, making domestic AI startups competitive on the international stage. \u201cIt\u2019s for European founders with a global ambition,\u201d says Varza.<\/p>\n
The program also represents a chance for the US-based AI labs to sow further seeds in Europe, using subsidies to incentivize a new generation of startups to build atop their technologies.<\/p>\n
Once a developer begins to build on top of a particular model, it is rarely straightforward to swap to an alternative, says Marta Vinaixa, partner and CEO at VC firm Ryde Ventures. \u201cWhen you build on top of these systems, you\u2019re also building for how the systems behave\u2014their quirkiness,\u201d she says. \u201cOnce you start with a foundation, at least for the same project, you\u2019re not going to change to another.\u201d<\/p>\n
The earlier in a company\u2019s lifecycle it begins to develop on top of a particular model, says Vinaixa, the more that effect is magnified. \u201cThe sooner that you start, the more that you accumulate, the more difficult it becomes,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, named F\/ai. On Tuesday, Station F announced it had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45169,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-45168","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}