5 French startups to look out for in 2014

Startups are springing up everywhere in Europe at an increasing rate. At the beginning of this year, we took a look at major European countries and tried to come up with a list of 5 startups for each country to look out for in 2014. We’re starting with France, and will soon move on to other countries in Europe. It’s been hard to narrow this list down to just five. Despite this, we’ve decided to select five promising French startups, each coming from different sectors. All of them entered the market within the last three years and each of the listed startups has something special to add to the web experience in 2014.

Pricing Assistant – This simple service gives smart pricing recommendations to e-merchants. The Paris-based startup also allows its clients to track prices of products across various vendors in order to weigh their own prices against their competitors. Pricing Assistant was founded at the end of 2012 and received €500K seed funding in September of 2013, as well as having won the prestigious LeWeb London startup competition in 2013.

mention (alert.io) – This Paris-based startup changes the way you manage your online presence. Create alerts for your company name, your brand, your competitors; get updated in real time by tracking the most relevant mentions all over the internet and social media. React, get statistics, collaborate with your team, all on the go! Founded in 2012, mention (alert.io) raised €590K seed funding in the first quarter of 2013.

Flayr – Officially launched in 2013, Flayr is a unique place for shopping discoveries, allowing people to discover outsourced and crowdsourced edgy little brands and take benefit of great deals on big brands. The platform offers products of many different categories and is already available in French, German and English. In November of 2013 the French startup received €4.5 million in Series A funding.

PriceMatch – This Parisian startup wants to industrialise and democratise revenue management for hotels. PriceMatch builds state-of-the-art econometric algorithms, predicting future demand and giving price recommendations. Those algorithms are implemented on a platform that is easy to use, and is entirely automatic, as well as being connected with multiple data sources and software already used by their clients. PriceMatch has developed powerful tools to measure the impact of its price recommendations on the revenue of its clients. Founded in 2012, PriceMatch received €1 million in seed funding in November of 2013.

whyd – This free social music platform, which was started in 2012, was designed for music lovers to keep, play, and share all the music on the internet. It’s the missing link between streaming platforms (YouTube or Soundcloud) and social media or sharing platforms (Facebook or Twitter). In the beginning of 2014 the Paris-based whyd-team received $700k in Seed funding. whyd’s CEO recently stated: “2014 will be a year of international expansion and growth for Whyd”.

The above list was prepared with the help of the European Startup Initiative (esi). During their research they spoke to accelerators and startup enthusiasts from all EU member states and asked them which three startups from their home country are most likely to be successful on a global scale. These answers counted towards our calculations, and led us to the above list of 5 French startups to look out for in 2014.

Update: Also make sure to check out the 2015, 2016 and 2017 and 2018 edition of this list.

By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!

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