AI Competitors Collaborate on a Startup Incubator

The largest western AI labs have paused their competitive exchanges to collaborate on a new accelerator program aimed at European startups developing applications based on their models. The Paris-based incubator Station F will oversee the initiative, named F/ai.

On Tuesday, Station F revealed its collaboration with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mistral, marking a historic moment as all these companies come together in a single accelerator. Additional partners include cloud and semiconductor giants AWS, AMD, Qualcomm, and OVH Cloud.

An accelerator serves as an intensive course for early-stage startups, where founders participate in classes and lectures, gain insights from experts, and are introduced to potential investors and customers. The overarching goal is to help startups bring their ideas to market swiftly.

Each F/ai cohort will consist of 20 startups, undergoing a curriculum tailored to help European AI firms generate revenue earlier in their development, thereby facilitating the funding necessary for expansion into major global markets. “We’re focusing on rapid commercialization,” says Roxanne Varza, director at Station F, during an interview with WIRED. “Investors are feeling that European companies are appealing, but they’re not reaching the $1 million revenue milestone quickly enough.”

The accelerator will operate for three months, twice annually. The first session commenced on January 13. Station F has not disclosed the startups in the current cohort, but many received recommendations from Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, or other venture capital firms involved in the program. The startups are all working on AI applications that leverage foundational models developed by the participating labs, spanning areas from agentic AI to procurement and finance.

Instead of direct funding, the participating founders will be awarded over $1 million in credits to exchange for access to AI models, computational resources, and other services offered by the partner companies.

With few exceptions, European companies have been trailing behind their American and Chinese counterparts at every level of the AI production chain. In an effort to bridge this gap, the UK and EU governments are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to support local AI firms and to develop the necessary data center and power infrastructure for training and operating AI models and applications.

In the US, tech accelerators like Y Combinator have fostered a range of household names, such as Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and Reddit. OpenAI itself was founded in 2015 with backing from Y Combinator’s research division. Station F aims for F/ai to have a similar effect in Europe, positioning domestic AI startups as competitive players on the world stage. “It’s for European founders with a global ambition,” Varza states.

The program also provides an opportunity for US-based AI labs to establish deeper roots in Europe, using subsidies to encourage a new wave of startups to innovate using their technologies.

Once a developer begins building on a specific model, transitioning to another is often not straightforward, explains Marta Vinaixa, partner and CEO at VC firm Ryde Ventures. “When you develop on these systems, you adapt to their unique behaviors,” she notes. “Once you start with a specific foundation, you’re unlikely to switch for the same project.”

The earlier a company starts to develop on a specific model, Vinaixa adds, the more pronounced this impact becomes. “The sooner you start, the more you accumulate, making it increasingly difficult to change,” she explains.