Bpifrance
Provides French businesses and researchers with grants, loans, and guarantees across innovation, commercialization, and industrial scaling.
Bpifrance (Banque Publique d'Investissement) is France's public investment bank, funding startups, SMEs, and mid-caps across grants, loans, guarantees, and equity. Its signature mission — 'Servir l'avenir' — underpins a full continuum of financing from seed-stage deeptech grants (Bourse French Tech Emergence, 90 k€) through large collaborative R&D projects (i-Démo, no cap stated) and industrial-scale first-factory investments (Première Usine, >5 M€ per project). In 2025 it injected 72 billion euros into the French economy across all its instruments combined.
For innovation, Bpifrance operates two overlapping mandates: its own direct programs (Bourse French Tech, ADD Deeptech, Prêt Innovation R&D) and the French State's France 2030 plan programs (i-Lab, i-PhD, i-Nov, i-Démo, Première Usine, Pionniers IA, Biothérapies), for which it acts as the administering agency while the primary funder is the State. The Plan Deeptech (2019, 2.5 Md€ envelope) specifically targets deeptech startups and sits within this mandate. Bpifrance also brokers bilateral Eureka R&D calls (France-Germany, France-Korea, Biotech) where French funding is delivered via Prêt Innovation R&D from the relevant regional Bpifrance office.