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After years of trying to reduce its dependence on nuclear power, France has had a change of heart, with €1bn committed by the government to support nuclear projects and startups developing small nuclear reactor technology. 

Today, we look into the country's nuclear bet, the companies working on the tech and why it'll take more than money from Macron to make it work. 

Elsewhere, we discover what investors do when they hang up the Patagonia fleece and leave VC, get top tips on job hunting in 2024 and dig into the numbers behind December's early-stage deals.

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French tech’s nuclear bet

After years of facing a wind down, the nuclear energy sector in France is getting a leg up following a change of heart from the government.

As part of its France 2030 plan, €1bn has been committed to support nuclear projects and startups developing small nuclear reactor technology. 

“Having this backing from the state ultimately reinforces the seriousness of the programme,” says Christophe Neugnot of the French nuclear industry association GIFEN. “What [nuclear startups] expect from the state is continuity, [...] that the state supports [them].”

A chunk has already been committed to eight startups in the sector. 

One of those is Jimmy Energy, which uses older nuclear fission technology to develop micro-reactors (SMRs) that connect directly to existing industrial facilities. The heat generated will be cheaper than fossil fuels, cofounder Antoine Guyot tells Sifted. 

“When we started [in 2020] everybody said I was crazy,” he says. “But every engineer in France knows that it is the key to decarbonisation. It was logical that a new age would come.”

Another company, NAAREA, is building small, modular reactors about the size of a bus that can be entirely manufactured in a factory — their size removes the need for water to cool the system. “This means you can locate your reactor anywhere on the planet,” says cofounder Jean-Luc Alexandre. The company is also drawing up a public education programme to address public concerns over safety and security. 

For companies like them to succeed will require more than government cash though — they’ll also need backing from VCs, which hasn’t always been an avenue the sector has explored, and an openness to mixed cap tables. NAAREA, for example, has raised €50m from family offices and angel investors, alongside the €10m it received from the government.

“We can be creative,” says Marie-Delphine Louveaux of Nuclear Valley, a French association of researchers, entrepreneurs and industrial players. “There are new financing solutions that don't exist or haven't yet been validated.”

— Kai Nicol-Schwarz, reporter

🐑 Retiring the Patagonia fleece: what investors do after they leave VC.

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🌱 Energy startups took pole position in a relatively quiet month on the seed deals front in December. 

• 273 pre-seed and seed deals brought in €403m last month — a drop from €576m across 499 deals in December 2022.
• December's figure was also down from the €504m raised in November. (Though it is worth noting there's often a lag in reporting early-stage deals.) 
• Seed-stage startups in the UK brought in €94m in December — falling from €133m in November — while French startups raised €78m and German startups raised €50m, both on par with November activity. 
• The energy sector sat top of the pile for funding in December, bringing in €61m and replacing healthtech, which dropped to second place with €59m raised. 

💰 European startups continued to have a tough time raising funding in Q4 of last year, with deal count and value both down from the quarter before, according to new PitchBook data. 

• Companies raised a total of €12.8bn across 1,708 deals — down from Q3’s €16.4bn across 2,101 deals. That’s the lowest quarterly deal count total since 2018, per PitchBook. 
• Each quarter during 2023 also saw less than €4bn in exit value, with the €11.8bn in annual exit value the lowest in Europe for a decade.
• Still, "despite the slowdown in dealmaking, median deal sizes for EU-based startups remained at or near all-time highs across all stages of VC", says Nalin Patel, lead private capital analyst for EMEA at PitchBook.

Oxford-based Beckley Psytech, which develops short-duration psychedelics for neuropsychiatric conditions, raised $50m from atai Life Sciences.

London-based Bumper, which offers flexible payments for car repairs, raised $48m in Series B funding. Autotech Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Shell Ventures, Jaguar Land Rover's InMotion Ventures, Porsche Ventures and Revo Capital.

Turin, Italy-based Resalis Therapeutics, which develops non-coding RNAs to tackle metabolic disorders, raised €10m in Series A funding. Sunstone Life Science Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Claris Ventures.

Bristol, UK-based FanHub, an app for football fans that gamifies the matchday experience, raised $3m in pre-seed funding. Blockchange Ventures led the round. 

Barcelona-based Manina Medtech, which specialises in IVF embryo implantation, raised €1.75m. Medex Partners led the round.

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