Sorry for the English, but I have no accent on this keyboard ;-).

It is now almost 2 years that I am trying to create my enterprise in France (je suis originaire de Bretagne, et fais mes etudes aux USA). I have developed a Semantic Technology capable of indexing and retrieving data given their semantic nature rather than some interpretation (keywords, …).

As you can imagine, the technology is a big buzz! Competitor like Hakia and PowerSet have collected tremendous amount of money to develop their solution over-seas.

At the start, while the interest from BA and other parties was very strong, all the monetary investment came from my own pocket. They all wanted to see the technology live: so I build a prototype (30K+ and 14 months of development).

Now that I have a running prototype, interested Beta-Clients and a sound Business plan, I find my project to be « too expensive » for most BA, public subventions and others. I am looking to raise around 3M (40K for Beta, 1.5M for core devel, 1.5M for app devel). I understand these are fairly large amount (compared to the easily raised 16M of PowerSet a few months ago, it looks like pennies…).

My question is the following: France is positioning itself as a competitive and entrepreneurial country. While I can certainly see it being true for industrial innovation (congrats to the several M raised by X to fly an electric plane), what about Information Technologies? All the subventions available to us are capped WAY below Industrial innovations. As if the IT innovation was itself « ethereal » and its development subsequently cheap!

I’d like to give a shout out: It DOES cost an ARM and a LEG to build a software solution. No, not all IT cost as much as a « web-site », IT is (and it is time to really grasp that concept) much more than simple information services.

So here are my thoughts. I would really much appreciate feedback that you might have on the matter.

Thank you,