A view shows the insect farm Ynsect, which harvests mealworms for bug-based animal food and fertilizer, in Dole, France, October 22, 2020. Picture taken October 22, 2020. REUTERS/Ardee Napolitano/File Photo
PARIS (Reuters) - Bankruptcies in France's tech start-up sector are increasing, according to a survey published on Tuesday whose findings could undermine President Emmanuel Macron's image of Paris as a leading European tech hub and key driver of the French economy.
During his first term in office, Macron touted Station F in Paris as an example of France's burgeoning tech start-up industry, and France's global AI summit in February attracted 110 billion euros of investment pledges.
However, industry research group ScaleX Invest said its survey pointed to French tech start-ups going bust, at a time when concerns about a global economic slowdown are hitting financial markets. [MKTS/GLOB]
ScaleX Invest said 10.4% of 1,487 start-up tech companies it had analysed faced a high risk of bankruptcy, and that the number of bankruptcies and insolvency proceedings was greater than the total of new Series A initial fund-raising rounds.
One example it cited was Ynsect, which filed for a safeguard plan last year and uses robotics to produce insect-based ingredients.
"Insolvency is increasingly affecting mature companies. On average, firms in insolvency had raised 32.5 million euros ($35.4 million), twice as much as those in previous years, yet still failed," ScaleX Invest chief operating officer Edouard Thibaut said.
"This underscores how tighter funding conditions and declining valuations are making it more difficult to access capital, even for well-funded scale-ups," he added.
($1 = 0.9174 euros)
(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta, editing by Ed Osmond)
