Insights from VivaTech & NVIDIA GTC in Paris
- lottamogrenjansson
- Jul 7
- 3 min read
The Viva Technology conference has been hosted for nine years in Paris. Its purpose is to connect startups, investors, major companies, and technology leaders. SEBx has attended multiple times over the years, and this year was no different. Victor and Ludwig from SEBx attended the conference, which drew 160 000 attendees this year. It was held in conjunction with NVIDIA's flagship conference, GTC.
The conference featured all the major technology companies. Meta's Chief Scientist Yann LeCun spoke about AI world models, and Microsoft was represented by GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke who held a talk about the impact of AI on software development. President Macron joined a fireside chat with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Mistral founder Arthur Mensch. It is clear that the French government wants to establish France as a significant tech hub.
This year's buzzwords
There were many themes at the conference, almost all influenced by AI in some way. However, the two that stood out the most were sovereignty and agentic AI.
The tumultuous past six months strongly influenced this year’s VivaTech. With escalating regional conflicts, trade wars, and a changing role for the United States, many European initiatives and topics took center stage. For the past ten years, large technology companies have played an increasingly important role in AI research, with academia previously holding a much stronger presence. This shift has also moved power geographically. Although the US maintains many strong academic institutions, their dominance is even greater when it comes to large technology firms.
The growing importance of AI for all businesses has increased dependency on the United States. In times of uncertainty regarding access to this crucial resource, the theme of sovereign AI became an important topic at VivaTech. NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang made it a focus of his keynote, expressing his belief that every country should have its own AI factory. An AI factory, according to Huang, is a datacenter running AI inference workloads.
The other theme, agentic AI, was also very prominent at this year’s conference. It was clear that everyone is building agents. Many were demonstrating their platforms for developing and deploying agents, but it is still unclear who will emerge as the winner in this space.
Things we were watching for
At a large conference like VivaTech, we've learned the importance of having a specific focus. It helps guide which companies you talk to or which sessions you attend if you have a thesis in mind. One thing we were searching for was the next generation of fintech companies, those leveraging new technologies to create better and/or automated insights for SMEs and mid-corp clients. However, we found that VivaTech had surprisingly little focus on fintech this year. We did find a few interesting startups demoing new products that we will keep an eye on going forward.
Another trend we were watching this year was companies building so-called "vibe-coding" tools, or leveraging them to achieve productivity gains in real-world scenarios. Vibe coding, a term coined a few months ago by Andrey Karpathy, has become one of the hottest buzzwords in technology. It essentially means that the software developer acts more as a copilot to the AI, rather than the AI being a copilot for the human. The AI does most of the heavy lifting. Most software developers are now familiar with the tool Cursor. We were curious if we could find a Cursor equivalent in another industry or domain. Although many agentic platforms were being demonstrated, which could be seen as a subset of "vibing", we did not find any tool as fully developed as Cursor outside of software development. It is clear, however, that vibe coding will have a significant impact on the software development industry going forward.
Conclusions
VivaTech 2025 was another demonstration from France that they are serious about establishing Paris as the technology hub of Europe. They excel at attracting both European and international talent to the conference. The event featured excellent sessions with many interesting companies present. One of SEBx's core missions is to understand the technology landscape, and the VivaTech conference remains a great place to do so.
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