Paris just turned the lights on for the ninth anniversary of the world’s largest startup campus.
Station F. It’s huge. It’s noisy. It used to be a railway station that nobody cared about. Now? It’s the center of gravity for European tech. Since 2017, the place has processed over 9,000 companies. Hugging Face walked out those doors. Pasqal. Pollen Robotics. The resume reads like a hit list.
But the numbers they dropped this week tell a different story than the hype machine usually spins.
The AI Shift
Everything is artificial intelligence right now.
Station F rolled out a new program called F/AI to make sure every major player showed up. Mistral AI came to town.
The stats are weird, though.
Seventy-seven percent of the companies inside say AI helped them hire less people. Makes sense, right? But wait. Eighty-two percent of those same companies are still hiring, or planning to, in the next few months.
You want to know whose tools they actually use? Not the ones from the valley, mostly.
Ninety percent of the teams here rely on Anthropic’s Claude.
That is a massive flip. Back in 2024, OpenAI ran the show on campus. Anthropic was stuck in third place. Now Claude is the default. It feels less like a tool and more like the operating system for building things here.
Exits are happening, too. Just this year, Koyeb—an alum from last batch—got scooped up by Mistral.
It follows a pattern. Pollen went to Hugging Face. Mithril Security went to H Company. Sonio to Samsung. Nobody is staying independent forever.
Greying Up the Disruption
Remember the stereotype? The twenty-year-old dropout in a hoodie. Disrupting stuff before their credit history is even built.
That’s gone.
The average founder at Station F is thirty-six and a half. Ten years ago? Thirty-one. One in five now has a PhD.
The myth of the fresh genius is dying.
Why? Because the bar for entry got harder. The ideas getting funding right now need deep technical chops. You can’t just pitch a clever idea on a napkin anymore. You need experience. Real jobs. Real scars.
Nobody wants an IPO.
Half the founders here expect their journey to end in an acquisition. They know the game.
Only 9% dream about going public. Last year it was 16%. The IPO dream isn’t just quiet anymore—it’s ghosting.
And they aren’t all from Paris.
About a third of the residents arrived from elsewhere. Right now, more than sixty nationalities are sharing the same floors.
After the French, who’s there?
- Morocco
- Germany
- The UK
- Algeria
- India
The US is still the biggest foreign bloc, sure. But the map is spreading out.
Election Anxiety
There was a moment.
When Station F was born, Emmanuel Macron just won his first presidential election. It felt like a omen. Young. Pro-business. Forward-looking. The air smelled like new money.
Nine years later?
The mood is heavy.
The next French election is coming next year and the founders are nervous.
More than half of them cite the election as their single biggest worry. Not the economy. Not talent wars. Politics.
Who do they fear?
Forty-seven percent are most scared of a far-right win. Twenty-four percent fear the far left.
It comes down to one thing: immigration.
This campus relies on outsiders. One in three people there wasn’t born in France. Tighter borders? Harder visa rules? That kills business models.
Station F put it plainly. A sharp change in immigration policy is now the biggest threat to building a competitive company here.
Nine years in, the place is bigger. Smarter. More technical.
But the future looks like a closed door.
