Guides and stories for founders
Fundraising, public grants, data rooms and tools: what actually helps you build a startup in France.
Guides
Startup Funding Stages Explained: From Pre-Seed to IPO
2025-2026 figures from Dealroom, Crunchbase, PitchBook, Atomico, and Carta: cheque sizes, dilution, and conversion rates.
Read →Funding a startup in France: what actually exists in 2026
Bourse French Tech, the JEI status after its reform, R&D tax credit, and investors. Figures checked against Bpifrance, service-public.fr, BOSS and BOFiP.
Read →French Tech Grant: amounts, criteria, and how to apply
Official ceiling €30,000, up to 70% of eligible costs, documents and filing steps. Checked against the Bpifrance catalogue in September 2026.
Read →Comparisons
Best Fundraising CRM Tools for Pre-Seed Startups in 2026
Onefive, Visible, Foundersuite, and OpenVC: August 2026 pricing, datarooms, and what changed since the 2025 roundups.
Read →Top All-in-One Startup Fundraising Platforms for Seed Stage Founders
AngelList, OpenVC, Foundersuite, and Onefive: what all-in-one actually covers at seed, and where each product stops.
Read →Top 5 AngelList Alternatives for Pre-Seed Founders
Onefive, OpenVC, Foundersuite, Gust, and Visible: what each tool actually replaces versus AngelList for pre-seed investor outreach.
Read →Best Investor Pipeline Management Platforms for Early Stage Founders
Gust, Visible, Foundersuite, and Onefive: what each product means by pipeline, and August 2026 pricing.
Read →Tools and reports
European startup funding tracker
Announced European rounds, each row linked to the source. Embeddable, CSV under CC BY 4.0. Not a Dealroom scrape.
Read →European startup fundraising benchmarks, 2025
Sourced tables from Atomico, PitchBook, Dealroom, and DocSend. Not a Onefive survey.
Read →
Fundraising pipeline tracker: spreadsheet, Airtable, Notion or a dedicated CRM?
How to track a fundraising pipeline: what a spreadsheet, Notion, Airtable and a dedicated CRM each do well, where they break, and when to switch.
Yannis Coulibaly
Secure document sharing with investors: the four controls to require
Per-investor access, link expiry, read tracking and versioning: the four controls to require before you send a deck or a cap table to an investor.
Yannis Coulibaly
Investor data room software: what the best platforms offer in 2026
What investor data room software must do, how DocSend, VDR platforms and fundraising tools compare, and how to choose by stage, from pre-seed to M&A.
Yannis Coulibaly
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Yannis Coulibaly
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Yannis Coulibaly
French Tech Grant: amounts, criteria, and how to apply
Official ceiling €30,000, up to 70% of eligible costs, criteria, documents and filing steps. Checked against the Bpifrance catalogue in September 2026.
Yannis Coulibaly
France's JEI status in 2026: conditions, the 20% threshold, exemptions
The 20% R&D threshold, the payroll tax exemption, JEC, JEIR and JEII: what France's young innovative company status requires and pays back in 2026.
Yannis Coulibaly
What is a data room, and why every fundraise needs one
Definition, documents expected at each stage, how it differs from a shared Drive, structure and mistakes to avoid: the data room guide for a pre-seed round.
Yannis Coulibaly
onefive is free: what that covers, and what changes next
One plan, €0, the product that ships today: dataroom, verified network, Spotlight, Le Tour de Table. What is included, what is not, and what could change.
Yannis Coulibaly
BSPCE: how they work, what they cost, and when to set them up
Eligibility (15% threshold since 2026), exercise price, the shareholder vote, 30% or 47.2% tax, common mistakes. The founder's guide to French startup warrants, sourced from Légifrance and BOFiP.
Yannis Coulibaly
How to keep control of your startup without owning the majority
Zuckerberg owns about 13 % of Meta and a majority of its voting power. The four mechanisms behind that gap, and what actually transfers to a European startup.
Yannis Coulibaly
What an investor really looks at in your dataroom
Your deck gets you the meeting. Your dataroom closes the round — or kills it. Structure, access control, and the one detail most founders skip.
Yannis Coulibaly
