Published on 22 August 2026
The ceiling in French cyber is commercial, not technical
Strong technical teams, very few companies reaching scale: what holds back French cyber startups is not technology, it is selling.
Europe’s lag in cybersecurity is usually explained by a technology gap. That is not what we see in the field.
What the orders of magnitude say
Public surveys of the French cyber ecosystem broadly agree: more than two hundred active companies, around thirty funding rounds across all stages over twelve months, a few hundred million euros invested. That is little for a market whose demand is driven by both the threat and the law. And every year a handful of companies drop off the radar without ever having become scale-ups.
A disappearance of that kind is rarely a technical failure. The products worked. They did not find the function that signs quickly enough.
The wall stands at the point of sale
A cyber product is not sold to a user, it is sold to an organisation. The CISO who likes the tool almost never signs alone: they have to bring along finance, procurement, legal, sometimes the data protection officer and the insurer. Each one asks for something different. A founder who has never seen that circuit from the inside discovers it during their first long cycle, which is to say too late.
What is missing at that point is almost never a better detection engine. It is the ability to name the buyer, to know which budget line the money comes from, and to articulate what that buyer will have to justify internally in order to spend it.
What we take from this at pre-seed
We look at the ability to convince an organisation as early as we look at technical quality. In practice, we ask for first contracts rather than first pilots, the name of the function that signed, and how the budget was arbitrated against something else. A free pilot proves interest; an arbitrated budget proves a problem.
That is also where we are most useful. Eleven years spent facing the departments that buy, and a consulting practice that puts us back in those meetings every week, are worth more to a young team than the capital we bring.
Building a product that has to convince an organisation? Let’s talk.