Who owns Hugging Face, Mistral AI and Doctolib? The real owners of 14 French tech companies

On October 13, 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced in Paris that his company would take a stake in Doctolib, the French medical booking platform. Six weeks earlier, Nvidia had agreed to buy Hugging Face, the open-source AI hub founded by three French entrepreneurs, for $12.93 billion. In France, the same question came up both times: are the country's tech champions becoming American?

For Doctolib, the answer is no. Doctolib is a French simplified joint-stock company (SAS) with no known foreign parent. Its cap table is not public. The latest available information, from 2019, showed a majority bloc made up of the founders, their circle and employees. Alongside them sit French funds (Bpifrance, Eurazeo, Kerala Ventures, Kernel), American ones (General Atlantic, Accel) and, since 2026, a British, a Danish and a German investor. Nvidia is set to come in as a minority shareholder, with no seat in its governance bodies.

For Hugging Face, the answer is different: it has been a Delaware corporation based in New York for years, and it is set to become an Nvidia subsidiary.

Doctolib's most concrete link to the United States runs through its technical providers, starting with its cloud host. Its privacy policy says so plainly: all personal data is stored with Amazon Web Services. The data sits in the European Economic Area, but AWS, whose parent is American, may be required to comply with the CLOUD Act.

We applied the same checks to twelve other French tech companies, most of them unicorns, from Mistral AI to Criteo. Almost everywhere, the debate is about who holds the shares, while the dependency runs through hosting first.

Doctolib and Nvidia: what the stake changes

On October 13, Nvidia announced investments in four French or French-founded companies: Doctolib, Pigment (business planning software), Genesis AI (robotics) and Entalpic (materials discovery). Nvidia's blog calls them "planned investments". No amounts were disclosed.

For Doctolib, neither the amount invested, nor the share of capital acquired, nor the valuation used has been disclosed. Le Figaro mentions "a few million euros", a figure neither company has confirmed. If it is accurate, it amounts to roughly 0.1% of the company, assuming the deal uses the €3.6 billion valuation reported in April. Doctolib CEO Stanislas Niox-Château told AFP that Nvidia would not get a seat "on the board". As a simplified joint-stock company, Doctolib's oversight body is in fact a supervisory committee.

The money is meant to fund hiring and the development of Doctolib's own AI models, trained in Europe on Nvidia infrastructure. Doctolib has been using Nvidia technology for a year already.

On control, nothing appears to move: Nvidia will be a minority shareholder without a seat, and Doctolib says no investor has access to data. The exact rights attached to Nvidia's shares are not public. On hosting, nothing changes either: the data stays with AWS (more on that below).

The announcement does follow a drop in valuation. In April 2026, around €300 million of existing shares changed hands, sold mostly by early investors and long-standing employees. According to Bloomberg, the deal valued Doctolib at €3.6 billion, down about 38% from the €5.8 billion of its 2022 funding round. Doctolib has not confirmed that figure. On the business side, its annual recurring revenue grew from €348 million in 2024 to €422 million in 2025, and its CEO says it has been profitable since autumn 2025.

Sources: AFP via Bourse Direct, Next, Nvidia blog, Maddyness, Bloomberg, FrenchWeb.

Three ways a company ends up under foreign control

"Americanization" covers very different situations, and they do not all weigh the same.

The foreign minority investor

This is the most common case, and the least serious. A foreign fund or group buys part of the company without taking a majority. As far as can be known, Doctolib, Mistral AI, Pigment, Alan, Qonto, BlaBlaCar, Back Market and Ubisoft (with China's Tencent) all fit here, sometimes with a heavy US presence: ICONIQ, IVP and Meritech at Pigment, Tiger Global, TCV and KKR at Qonto, Coatue and Dragoneer at Alan.

The investor's nationality matters less than the rights attached to its shares: a board seat, a veto, a right of first refusal on a sale. Those terms sit in shareholder agreements, which are almost never public.

The risk plays out over three to five years. Today's investors are tomorrow's sellers, and they will sell to the highest bidder.

Acquisition or de facto control: the tipping point

Here, control changes hands.

• Gleamer, a French radiology AI company, has been 100% owned by US group RadNet since March 2, 2026, for about €230 million. Before the sale, its known investors were all European.
• Hugging Face, the reference platform for open AI models, founded by three French entrepreneurs, is set to be acquired by Nvidia for $12.93 billion. The deal was signed on September 2, 2026, and is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals. France's economy minister, Roland Lescure, called it a "wake-up call".
• Leboncoin, the French classifieds site, was co-founded in 2006 by Norway's Schibsted, which became its sole owner in 2010 and later held it through Adevinta. It changed hands in 2024, when Permira (based in London) and Blackstone (US) bought Adevinta.
• Deezer, listed in Paris, has not been acquired. But Access Industries, the group of US-British billionaire Len Blavatnik, holds 36.1% of the shares and 38.7% of the voting rights. In its own universal registration document, Deezer acknowledges that Access Industries "could be considered as controlling the Company", while stating that no shareholder controls it in the strict sense of the French Commercial Code.

Legal relocation: the head office moves, the teams stay

This is the least visible form. The company keeps its engineers in France, but the entity at the top of the group is incorporated elsewhere.

• Dataiku, founded in Paris in 2013, is controlled by Dataiku Inc., a Delaware corporation created in 2015 and headquartered in New York, which chairs the French company.
• Hugging Face works the same way: the parent is Hugging Face, Inc. (Delaware), based in Brooklyn. Its Paris subsidiary had between 50 and 99 employees in 2024.
• Criteo, the French retargeting pioneer, left French law on July 29, 2026, to become a Luxembourg company. Luxembourg is only a stopover: Criteo explains that French law offers no direct route to a US legal form. A merger into Criteo Holdings, Inc. (Delaware) has been signed and is scheduled for January 1, 2027, subject to a shareholder vote.

In all three cases, jobs in France say nothing about the applicable law. For Dataiku and Hugging Face today, and for Criteo from 2027, a US order targets the parent company, wherever its staff work.

The table: 14 French unicorns and tech champions

How to read it. "Not public" means the cap table is not published: we can neither confirm nor rule out foreign control.

The blind spot: where the data is hosted

The public debate is about shareholders. For users' data, what matters is the cloud provider.

Twelve of the fourteen companies entrust some or all of their users' data to AWS or Google Cloud. Even Mistral AI, which runs its own compute capacity in Europe, lists Google, Microsoft and CoreWeave among its infrastructure subcontractors. Criteo runs its own servers (27,793 at the end of 2025) in eleven data centers leased from hosting providers it does not name, in France, the Netherlands, the US, Singapore and Japan, and some of its products also rely on major public clouds, which it does not name either. Ubisoft does not name a hosting provider in its privacy policy.

A US cloud provider remains subject to US law, even when its servers are in Paris or Frankfurt. The CLOUD Act, passed in 2018, lets US authorities compel a US company to hand over data it holds, wherever that data is stored. It does not matter whether the provider's customer is French.

Doctolib is the clearest example, because it says so itself. Its July 2026 privacy policy reads (our translation):

"Doctolib uses Amazon Web Services as its Health Data Host [...] Doctolib has decided to store all Personal Data there, whether or not it qualifies as Health Data."

The policy specifies that this data is stored in the European Economic Area, "with no access from outside the EEA as part of the service". It then adds:

"AWS does not hold the SecNumCloud 3.2 qualification. [...] AWS's parent company is established in the United States. In specific cases, AWS may therefore be required to comply [...] (USA Patriot Act, FISA Section 702, Cloud Act, EO 12333), in which case personal data may be accessed from outside the EEA, in particular from the United States."

We have rarely seen a company put it this bluntly, and Doctolib deserves credit for it. Another point in its favor: the encryption key is hosted in France, by Atos. This encryption by a trusted third party located in France was one of the safeguards France's Council of State relied on in 2021, along with the limited nature of the data and an amendment to the AWS contract, when it refused to suspend the government's Covid-19 vaccination partnership with Doctolib. The privacy policy also lists S3NS, a cloud operated in France. It does, however, name Microsoft, Google and Anthropic among the providers behind its health assistant's models, as well as other US subprocessors such as Salesforce and Datadog.

Doctolib is not alone. Alan hosts its data with AWS in Frankfurt and Paris, Qonto with AWS in France and Germany, Leboncoin with Amazon Web Services Inc., the Seattle-based US company, with data located in Europe. BlaBlaCar's website is hosted on Google Cloud in the Netherlands.

There are alternatives. Pigment offers its customers S3NS, a cloud with France's SecNumCloud qualification. Criteo runs nearly 28,000 servers that it owns. Mistral AI is deploying its own compute capacity, at sites built by European partners.

Nvidia's stake in Doctolib does nothing to change the exposure of patients' data. A change of cloud provider would.

Sources: Doctolib privacy policy, July 2026, Council of State order no. 450163 of March 12, 2021, Alan security page, Qonto privacy policy, Leboncoin terms, BlaBlaCar terms, Pigment security page, Google Cloud press release on Back Market, Criteo 2025 annual report to the SEC, Google Cloud case study on Gleamer, Deezer 2025 universal registration document.

Company profiles

Hugging Face: a Delaware company, set to become an Nvidia subsidiary

Hugging Face, Inc. is a Delaware corporation based in Brooklyn, whose terms of service are governed by New York law. Its three founders, Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, are French, as is much of the team. Hugging Face SAS, in Paris, is its main establishment in the European Union under the GDPR. On September 2, 2026, Nvidia signed an agreement to acquire it: about $11.9 billion for shareholders and up to $1 billion in stock to retain employees. Its investors are mostly American, from Lux Capital to the participants in its 2023 round: Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD.

Sources: Hugging Face terms of service, Nvidia Form 8-K, Nvidia blog, AFP via TechXplore, TechCrunch (2023).

Mistral AI: French, controlled by its founders

Mistral AI SAS (SIREN 952 418 325), in Paris, contracts with its European customers under French law (California law for the Americas, Singapore law for Asia-Pacific). In September 2026, it raised €3 billion at a valuation of more than €21 billion. The round was led by South Korea's Samsung Electronics, with the European Scaleup Europe fund (managed by EQT) and US-based PSG Equity as co-leads. Nvidia, a16z, Lightspeed, General Catalyst, ASML, Bpifrance and around fifteen other investors took part. Its CFO, Johan Bergqvist, says the founders "still control the company". According to franceinfo, Europe holds about two thirds of the capital and three quarters of the votes on the board.

Sources: Mistral AI announcement, AFP via DH, franceinfo.

Doctolib: French, hosted on AWS

Doctolib SAS (SIREN 794 598 813), in Levallois-Perret near Paris, is the group's parent company. No foreign parent is known. Its cap table is not published. In 2019, the bloc made up of the founders, their circle and employees held a majority, and nothing more recent has been made public. Doctolib's publicly known shareholders, at one point or another, are Bpifrance, Eurazeo, Kerala Ventures, Kernel (France), General Atlantic and Accel (US), Generation Investment Management (UK), A.P. Møller Holding (Denmark) and Athos (Germany), the last three having bought in during the April 2026 share sale, in which early investors sold. And, announced in October, Nvidia. Doctolib is not listed: an IPO is "not on the agenda", the company said in April.

Sources: French national business register, FrenchWeb, TICsanté, Décideurs (2019), Le Figaro.

Pigment: French, backed by US funds

Pigment SAS (SIREN 852 785 914), in Paris, contracts with its European customers. Pigment Inc., its New York subsidiary, contracts with North American customers, but nothing suggests it sits at the top of the group. Its investors are mostly American (ICONIQ Growth, Greenoaks, IVP, Meritech, FirstMark), plus London-based Blossom and Felix. Its last round, $145 million in April 2024, took its valuation above $1 billion, according to Fortune. The magazine adds that most of its executives work in the US while engineering stays in France. Customers choose between Google Cloud in Frankfurt or Oregon, or S3NS.

Sources: Pigment privacy policy, Series D announcement, master services agreement, Fortune.

Alan: French, with a very international cap table

Alan SA (SIREN 818 353 070), in Paris, is the group's parent, and Alan Insurance SA is the licensed insurer. In 2026, Alan raised €100 million in March, then €480 million in June in a round led by Dutch group Prosus, at a €5.5 billion valuation. Its investors come from Europe (Index Ventures, Belfius, Exor, Prosus), the US (Coatue, Ribbit, Dragoneer, Greenoaks), Singapore (Temasek) and Canada (Ontario Teachers'). The cap table is not published, but according to Sifted, the founders and employees still held a majority of voting rights in 2024.

Sources: French national business register, Maddyness, Sifted (2024).

Qonto: French, still waiting for its banking license

Qonto SA (SIREN 819 489 626), in Paris, is a payment institution licensed by France's banking regulator, the ACPR. Its application for a banking license, filed in 2025, is still pending. Its investors: Valar Ventures (US), which sits on its board, Alven and Eurazeo (France), Tencent (China), Tiger Global, TCV, KKR and Insight Partners (US). Its last major round, €486 million in January 2022, valued it at €4.4 billion. A crowdfunding campaign among its customers followed in April 2022, at the same valuation. The cap table is not public.

Sources: French national business register, Next, Journal du Net.

BlaBlaCar: French, with a Swedish largest known shareholder

BlaBlaCar is the brand of Comuto SA (SIREN 491 904 546), in Paris, whose board is chaired by founder Frédéric Mazzella; Nicolas Brusson is its CEO. It is not listed. The only published stake is that of Swedish fund VNV Global: 13.5% as of June 30, 2026. Other investors include Index Ventures, Insight Partners and Lead Edge Capital. French rail operator SNCF bought in in 2018 when BlaBlaCar took over its Ouibus coach service, but we could not confirm that it still holds shares. The last equity round dates from April 2021.

Sources: BlaBlaCar terms, VNV Global half-year report, BlaBlaCar newsroom, tech.eu (2018).

Back Market: French, profitable for the first time in 2025

Back Market is the brand of Jung SAS (SIREN 804 049 476), in Paris, chaired by the holding company of co-founder Thibaud Hug de Larauze. Its investors are French (Eurazeo, Aglaé Ventures from the Arnault group, daphni), American (General Atlantic, Goldman Sachs) and British (Sprints Capital, Generation). Its last round, in January 2022, valued it at $5.7 billion. The cap table is not public.

Sources: French national business register, Back Market press release, Maddyness.

Ubisoft: the family at the helm, with Tencent at every level

Ubisoft Entertainment SA (SIREN 335 186 094), headquartered in Carentoir, Brittany, is listed in Paris. As of May 27, 2026, the Guillemot family held 13.91% of the shares and 20.26% of the voting rights. China's Tencent owns 9.44% directly. It also holds 49.9% of the economic rights (but 5% of the votes) in the family holding company Guillemot Brothers, and 26.32% of Vantage Studios, the subsidiary behind Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six, for which it paid €1.16 billion in 2025. The family remains the largest shareholder and runs the group, without legal control, which it says it does not intend to take. The 2022 agreement caps the concert with Tencent at 29.9%; it held 28.79% of the votes as of May 27, 2026.

Sources: AMF filing, June 2026, Ubisoft press release, 2022, Vantage Studios closing press release.

Deezer: listed in Paris, with Access Industries in a position of de facto control

Deezer SA (SIREN 898 969 852) is listed on Euronext Paris. As of December 31, 2025, Access Industries, Len Blavatnik's group, held 36.1% of the shares and 38.7% of the voting rights. Together with Warner Music, which Access also controls, the bloc reaches 42% of the votes. No other shareholder comes close: Deezer itself acknowledges that Access Industries could be considered as controlling it at shareholder meetings, while stating that no shareholder controls it in the strict sense of the French Commercial Code. Next come Orange (7.7%), two vehicles linked to Saudi Arabia (5.1% each) and Artémis, the Pinault family holding company (4.3%).

Source: Deezer 2025 universal registration document, § 7.3.

Leboncoin: controlled by Permira and Blackstone

LBC France SAS (SIREN 521 724 336), which publishes Leboncoin, belongs to Adevinta, a group of Norwegian origin whose parent is now Dutch. Since 2024, Adevinta has been jointly controlled by Permira (based in London) and Blackstone (US), alongside General Atlantic and TCV. Adevinta was spun out of Norway's Schibsted, which co-founded Leboncoin in 2006. Norway's Vend, formerly Schibsted, owns 14% of Adevinta, and eBay about 8%.

Sources: notification to the European Commission, case M.11385, eBay quarterly report to the SEC, Vend.

Gleamer: acquired by US group RadNet

Gleamer SAS (SIREN 834 105 470), in Saint-Mandé near Paris, builds AI software for radiology. Since March 2, 2026, it has been 100% owned by RadNet, one of the leading US networks of outpatient imaging centers, through a Dutch holding company. The price: about €230 million, including €15 million contingent on performance. Before the sale, its known institutional investors were all European: Supernova Invest, XAnge, Elaia, Bpifrance, MACSF, Heal Capital, Crista Galli Ventures and UI Investissement, alongside the founders and business angels.

Sources: RadNet quarterly report to the SEC, RadNet Form 8-K, CFNews.

Dataiku: founded in Paris, headquartered in New York

Dataiku Inc. is a Delaware corporation created in 2015 and headquartered in New York. It chairs Dataiku SAS in Paris, which has between 250 and 499 employees. By default, customers of its cloud offering contract with the French company; French law applies in France and continental Europe, except Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Its known investors are mostly American (Tiger Global, ICONIQ, CapitalG, Wellington). A US IPO has been in preparation since 2025, with no public filing so far.

Sources: EDGAR, French national business register, Dataiku Cloud terms, data processing addendum.

Criteo: Luxembourg since July, American in 2027

Criteo became a Luxembourg société anonyme on July 29, 2026. It is listed on Nasdaq. Shareholders approved the move by a very large majority in February. The next step, a merger into Criteo Holdings, Inc. (Delaware, headquartered in New York), is scheduled for January 1, 2027, subject to another vote. Its main shareholders are asset managers: Neuberger Berman (16.2%), DNB (11.2%), Senvest (9.4%), Morgan Stanley (9.1%). Most of its French staff are employed by Criteo Technology SAS, in Paris.

Sources: Criteo press release, July 2026, Form 8-K of August 5, 2026, Criteo Q&A on the redomiciliation, Form S-4.

What this means for a company choosing its vendors

The same three questions apply to any software, AI or cloud vendor. They can be checked in about ten minutes, using public documents.

1. Which company signs the contract, and who owns it? The legal notice names the contracting entity. For French companies, the national register (annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr) shows who chairs it. For an SAS, a chair that is a foreign company (Dataiku Inc. at Dataiku, a Dutch holding company of RadNet at Gleamer) is a strong signal. But a French chair can itself belong to a foreign group: LBC France, which publishes Leboncoin, is chaired by Adevinta France.
2. Who hosts the data, by name? The privacy policy or the subprocessor list should say. Doctolib, Alan and Qonto do. A vendor that won't name its cloud provider has already answered.
3. What happens if the vendor is acquired? A solid contract includes a change-of-control clause: the right to terminate, retrieve your data or have it deleted if the vendor comes under foreign control.

We applied a similar set of checks (capital, hosting, inference) to fourteen French enterprise AI vendors in a dedicated survey. The result is close to this one: thirteen contract through a French company, but only four host data with a European provider by default.

At Ask This Guy, we made that choice from day one: 100% French-owned, data on OVHcloud servers in Gravelines, and models that can run exclusively in Europe. The details are on our sovereign AI page.

Frequently asked questions about who owns French tech companies

Who owns Hugging Face?

Hugging Face's shareholders, mostly US investors such as Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon and Nvidia, are selling the company to Nvidia. The agreement was signed on September 2, 2026, for $12.93 billion, including up to $1 billion in employee retention stock. Closing is expected in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals. Once it closes, Hugging Face will be an Nvidia subsidiary.

Is Hugging Face a French company?

Not legally. Hugging Face, Inc. is a Delaware corporation based in New York, founded by three French entrepreneurs: Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. It has a Paris subsidiary, Hugging Face SAS, which is its main establishment in the European Union under the GDPR.

Who owns Mistral AI?

Mistral AI's founders, Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, still control the company, according to its CFO. After the €3 billion round of September 2026, led by Samsung, Europe holds about two thirds of the capital. Investors include ASML, Bpifrance, Eurazeo, BNP Paribas, the Scaleup Europe fund, Samsung, Nvidia, a16z, Lightspeed and General Catalyst.

Who owns Doctolib?

Doctolib is owned by its founders, its employees and investors, with no publicly identified majority shareholder. It is a French company (Doctolib SAS) with no known foreign parent. In 2019, the founders, their circle and employees formed a majority bloc. Known investors are Bpifrance, Eurazeo, Kerala Ventures, Kernel, General Atlantic, Accel, Generation, A.P. Møller Holding, Athos and Nvidia, whose investment was announced in October 2026.

Can Nvidia access Doctolib's health data?

Nothing suggests it can. Nvidia is set to become a minority shareholder with no seat in Doctolib's governance bodies, and Doctolib says no investor has access to data. However, Doctolib stores all personal data with Amazon Web Services. Its privacy policy states that AWS, whose parent is American, may be required to comply with the CLOUD Act or FISA. The encryption key is hosted in France, by Atos.

Where is Dataiku headquartered?

In New York. Dataiku Inc., a Delaware corporation created in 2015, is headquartered in New York and chairs the French company, Dataiku SAS, in Paris, where the company was founded in 2013.

Where is Criteo headquartered?

In Luxembourg, since July 29, 2026, when Criteo converted from a French company into a Luxembourg société anonyme. A merger into Criteo Holdings, Inc., a Delaware corporation based in New York, is planned for January 1, 2027, subject to a shareholder vote.

Who owns BlaBlaCar?

BlaBlaCar is the brand of Comuto SA, a French company whose board is chaired by founder Frédéric Mazzella. It is not listed and its cap table is not public. The only shareholder with a published stake is Swedish fund VNV Global, with 13.5% as of June 30, 2026.

How can you tell whether a French company is foreign-owned?

Look it up on annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr. If it is an SAS chaired by a foreign company, control very likely sits abroad. If the chair is a French company, follow the chain: it may itself belong to a foreign group. For an SA, the chair is a natural person and says nothing about shareholders. For a listed company, the universal registration document gives the breakdown of shares and voting rights. For a private company, the cap table is usually not public: funding rounds reported in the press give clues, but not percentages.

---

In short

Nvidia's stake does not make Doctolib an American company. Of fourteen French tech champions, three have been acquired or are being acquired (Gleamer, Hugging Face, Leboncoin). Three have moved, or will move, their parent company out of France (Dataiku, Hugging Face, Criteo), with Hugging Face in both groups. Deezer acknowledges that a foreign shareholder could be considered to control it de facto. For six others, the cap table is not public.

The most widespread dependency is hosting. Twelve of the fourteen companies entrust some or all of their data to AWS or Google Cloud. That decision is not made in the boardroom: it is made by the engineering team, and it can be reversed.

If you are preparing an enterprise AI project and want to test these criteria against your own context: book a demo.

Update log

• 15 October 2026: published.