AI Industry Rivals Are Teaming Up on a Startup Accelerator

The greatest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping each other to collaborate on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, called F/ai.

On Tuesday, Station F announced that it had collaborated with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral, which it says is the first time that the companies are all participating in a single accelerator. Other partners include cloud and semiconductor companies AWS, AMD, Qualcomm, and OVH Cloud.

An accelerator is effectively a crash course for early-stage startups, where founders attend classes and lectures, consult with specialists and receive introductions to potential investors and customers. The broad goal is to help startups bring ideas to market as quickly as possible.

The 20 startups in each F/ai cohort will undergo a curriculum specifically aimed at helping European AI startups generate revenue earlier in their lifecycle, which in turn will make it easier to secure the funding needed to expand to the largest global markets. “We're focusing on rapid commercialization,” says Roxanne Varza, director at Station F, in an interview with WIRED. “Investors are starting to feel like, 'European companies are nice, but they're not hitting the $1 million revenue mark fast enough.'

The accelerator will run for three months, twice a year. The first edition started on January 13. Station F did not reveal which startups make up the cohort, but many were recommended by Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, or one of the other VC companies involved in the program. The startups are all building AI applications on top of the fundamental models developed by the partner labs, in areas ranging from agentic AI to procurement and finance.

Instead of direct funding, participating founders will receive more than $1 million in credits that can be traded for access to AI models, computing and other services from partner companies.

With a few exceptions, European companies have so far lagged behind their American and Chinese counterparts at every stage of the AI ​​production line. To try to close that gap, the UK and EU governments is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into efforts to support homegrown AI companies, and develop the domestic data center and power infrastructure needed to train and operate AI models and applications.

In the US, tech accelerators like Y Combinator have produced a crop of household names, including Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash and Reddit. OpenAI itself was founded in 2015 with the help of financing of the then research division of Y Combinator. Station F aims for F/ai to have a similar impact in Europe, making domestic AI startups competitive on the international stage. “It's for European founders with a global ambition,” says Varza.

The program also represents an opportunity for the US-based AI laboratories to sow further seeds in Europe, with the help of grants to encourage a new generation of startups to build on top of their technologies.

Once a developer starts building on top of a certain model, it's rarely easy to switch to an alternative, says Marta Vinaixa, partner and CEO at VC firm Ryde Ventures. “​​​​​When you build on top of these systems, you are also building for how the systems behave – their idiosyncrasies,” she says. “Once you start with a foundation, at least for the same project, you will not change to another.”

The earlier in the life cycle of a company it starts to develop on top of a certain model, says Vinaixa, the more that effect is magnified. “The earlier you start, the more you collect, the harder it gets,” she says.