I am glad to share with you our annual report on the French FoodTech ecosystem. Even if we now spend most of our time looking at innovation outside France’s borders, we still follow with great interest what is happening there. You can download the full report here.

1 – French FoodTech startups will raise around €290M in 2025 (with €225M already raised through Q3), down 35% from 2024 and 74% from the 2022 peak, on par with the rest of the world. The decline appears to be slowing, suggesting that the situation could stabilise before a possible rebound in 2026–2027.

We should note that several bridge rounds (additional capital injections from existing investors to keep startups afloat until their next raise) have also taken place this year, often without public disclosure, and are, for the most part, absent from this data.

This new phase raises questions about both its capacity for renewal and for growth:

• Shrinking pool of early-stage companies: a good example is the fact that we weren’t able to spot a single startup created in the past year that has already raised significant capital. More broadly, number of startups created each year keeps shrinking and early-stage funding (from seed to series A) has almost vanished. Only €40M were invested since the start of the year in pre-seed and seed deals, compared to €94M in 2024 and €152M in 2023.
• Scaling up is getting harder: scaling up a startup requires (a lot of) funding, but the two sources that supported France’s AgriFoodTech ecosystem in the past years, public funding and foreign investors, have almost completely retracted.

At this rate, and if nothing is done to restore confidence in the innovation ecosystem’s ability to deliver results, the innovation ecosystem could disappear in a few years.

While AgTech is globally one of the Foodtech categories which are doing relatively well, this doesn’t translate in the French ecosystem. Indeed, investments in France’s AgTech, primarily related to insect farming, are plummeting. And what remains in 2025 is largely linked to bailout rounds (such as Ÿnsect and Agronutris).

To go beyond the picture given by investments, we updated DigitalFoodLab’s mapping of the top French startups. Among all the active French startups, we have selected those that we believe have the greatest potential for growth, a significant exit, or the ability to leverage innovation to improve the agrifood value chain in the year ahead. For that, we look at different criteria, including how they align with key trends, funding (is there enough money in the bank to go the next stage?), hype, and corporate involvement.

You can find here the list of 25 startups, including their names, links, and activity descriptions.

It provides a good view of where the ecosystem stands today, with an increasing number of internationally relevant Food Science players, including both established brands (La Vie, Hydratis…) and sustainable ingredients startups.

The overall context remains challenging, with political instability adding to investor caution. Yet the outlook is not entirely bleak: France retains strong expertise in AgTech and ingredients, and the emergence of visible consumer brands such as Accro and La Fourche proves that the ecosystem can still reinvent itself.