Startup hub Station F enlists corporates for European AI programme

Corporates including Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta are onboard for F/ai, which is providing support and tools to 20 AI startups.

Corporates and venture capital firms are backing an artificial intelligence programme officially launched by Paris-based startup campus Station F.

Generative AI developers OpenAI, Anthropic, Lovable, Clay, G42, Mistral and Hugging Face are joining cloud service providers AWS and OVHcloud, chipmakers Qualcomm and AMD and software producers Google, Microsoft, Meta, CloudFlare and Snowflake in providing support for the initiative, dubbed F/ai.

“With F/ai, we are creating the conditions for AI founders to build globally competitive companies from Europe – faster, more responsibly, and with the right level of ambition. Europe’s future in AI depends not only on excellence in research, but on our ability to execute, commercialize, and scale. F/ai is designed to do exactly that,” said Roxanne Varza, director of Station F, in a release.

F/ai kicked off last month with 20 AI-native startups chosen through a recommendation-based process, rather than through applications, with a key qualifier being the potential to reach €1m ($1.2m) in revenue within six months.

Station F offers startups office space, meeting rooms and facilities in a bid to promote the creation of new tech companies. Participants in F/ai will also get access to advanced software tools, expertise, senior leadership and international networks. Their identities will be revealed in April this year.

“We’re at a point where the main constraint in building companies isn’t code or capital anymore. It’s learning speed and who can iterate fastest,” Anton Osika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable, said in a release.

“When more people can turn ideas into real, working products, you get real experimentation and real businesses. Programmes like F/ai matter because they compress the path from research to something that actually ships. They give ambitious teams the environment, feedback and pressure needed to move from thinking to building. That’s where progress happens.”