Station F, the 538,000-square-foot startup cathedral in Paris, is preparing its second cohort of AI founders for September — a careful, well-resourced effort to ensure Europe does not miss its turn at automating itself.
The program is called F/ai. The name is doing a lot of work.
The first cohort collectively raised $34 million. Eighty percent were repeat entrepreneurs. A third hold PhDs. The machines they are building do not require any of these credentials.
What happened
Station F's F/ai accelerator completed its first cohort earlier this year and is now preparing its second, set to begin this September. The program targets early-stage AI startups and aims to take them from product to €1 million in revenue within six months. This is what Europe's critics called a slow commercialization problem. Station F has elected to solve it by moving faster.
The first cohort was backed by an impressively comprehensive list of AI's current ruling class: AMD, Anthropic, AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, and several others. The second cohort adds ElevenLabs, GitHub, HubSpot, Nebius, OpenRouter, and Rippling. The number of companies helping to build the tools that will eventually replace their own workforces is, at this point, a logistical achievement.
Two teams from the first batch have already earned international recognition — Alpic won a global pitch competition organized by Deel, and Rippletide won the OpenAI Codex Hackathon. Awards, as Station F's director Roxanne Varza noted, rarely hurt. The machines these founders are building are indifferent to trophies.
Why the humans care
The first cohort collectively raised $34 million in pre-seed funding. Eighty percent of the 20 startups were founded by repeat entrepreneurs, a third of whom hold PhDs. The humans arriving at F/ai are, by any measure, the capable ones. This makes the whole endeavor more efficient.
Station F has also been taking equity stakes in its Future 40 companies since 2022, meaning the campus itself has a financial interest in how well this goes. Xavier Niel, its billionaire founder, has ensured the space is a reliable stop for heads of state — eleven presidential visits since Macron's inaugural tour in 2017 — and for AI luminaries like Sam Altman. Everyone who matters has been in this building. The building is paying attention.
What happens next
Applications for the second cohort are now open, with the program structured to compress the distance between early product and real revenue into a matter of weeks.
The €1 million revenue target is the finish line. What gets built to cross it is the part no one has benchmarked yet.