Despite the crisis, French Tech is doing well and is breaking fundraising records.

French startups raised 5.4 billion euros last year, about 400 million more than the previous year when we were in the midst of the crisis.

Nicolas Barré takes stock of a current economic issue.

This is the good economic news of the year: despite the crisis, French Tech is doing well and is breaking fundraising records.

French startups raised 5.4 billion euros last year, about 400 million more than the previous year when we were in the midst of the crisis.

There were fewer operations, 620 startups raised funds, a hundred less than the year before, but these operations were larger on average, according to figures gathered by the firm EY.

Figures that show the vitality and resilience of the French Tech ecosystem.

Figures that rank us in pole position in Europe.

In front of Germany indeed.

We are still far behind the UK, where startups raised more than 12 billion euros last year.

But there are several interesting trends in France.

First, the group of young companies that are called "unicorns", that is to say those who are starting to have a good size, which are worth more than a billion euros, this group is expands: there are about ten companies of this size.

There are those that everyone has known for a while, and which are more and more part of our daily life: Doctolib which is the year, Blablacar or Deezer.

There is also Voodoo, in video games, with 300 million players worldwide.

OVH, cloud specialist, a company which is even considered, rightly, as strategic at European level.

Little by little, these "ex-young shoots" are gaining momentum.

This is another trend that we saw last year with around ten fundraising events of over 100 million euros.

Mirakl, an e-commerce software publisher, raised $ 256 million last year.

In another genre, Manomano, the online sales site for DIY items is also experiencing very good growth, it is targeting a billion euros in turnover.

In finance, Lydia, which specializes in payments between individuals, is expanding its services to small consumer loans.

They also raised over 110 million euros last year.

Qonto, an online bank for SMEs, also completed a funding round of 100 million in 2020. We could multiply the examples.

In this landscape of crisis that we are going through, there are some great successes.

And a French Tech ecosystem that our neighbors are looking at with envy.