DEVELOPING SCIENTIFIC AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES IN YOUR STARTUP?
THINKING ABOUT NORTH AMERICA AND ITS INNOVATION ECOSYSTEMS?
About NETVA
The New Technology Venture Accelerator (NETVA) program offers young French innovative startups a personalized support program, opportunity analysis and development of technological partnerships in the United States. Managed by the teams of the Science and Technology Department of the French Embassy in the United States (Boston, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago and Houston), NETVA aims to meet the internationalization needs of French startups developing innovative products with high added value.
NETVA is addressed to French startups of innovative technologies in all fields, originating from or backed by research laboratories and which intend to develop in North America. This tenth edition is primarily aimed at early-stage projects in the fields of artificial intelligence applied to health and industry of the future. Particular attention will be paid to the adequacy between the startups’ sector of activity and the respective strengths of open ecosystems, of which biotechnology, health, energy and agritech are among others.
Each year, 15 French startups are selected though a national competition after evaluation by juries in France and the program’s three American cities. In 2015, the program was expanded to Canada.
Five innovative North American ecosystems
The selected winners benefit from intensive training at a seminar in Paris, strategic support and an immersion stay in the most dynamic ecosystems of the United States. This year, the NETVA program will be held in partnership with Bpifrance, and will be open to two new geographical areas in the United States: Chicago and Houston.
The winners will be able to explore one of the following five ecosystems: Texas (Houston, Austin, Dallas), Silicon Valley (San Francisco, Seattle), the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. (Virginia, Maryland, Washington D.C.), the northeast coast (New York, Rhode Island, Boston), the Great Lakes region (Chicago, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Detroit, St Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati).
During the selection process, particular attention may be paid to the adequacy between the startups’ sector of activity and the respective strengths of open ecosystems, summarized here:
- Houston and Texas: energy, electronic-IT, medical,
- Chicago and the Great Lakes region: agritech, agriculture, agronomy,
- Washington D.C. and its region: cybersecurity, defense, telecommunications, aerospace, health regulation, govtech, social tech,
- Boston, New York and New England: biotech, health, robotics, cleantech,
- San Francisco and the Bay Area: Applied AI, human-machine interfaces, Repair and increase of the human being.
Texas
The Houston, Texas constituency offers three main themes of interest to the Netva program:
Energy: As the world’s energy capital, Houston is the epicentre of technological innovation in the oil and gas industries. The innovation themes of this sector mainly concern automation, exploratory robotics, hydrogen technologies, massive data exploitation and risk management.
Health: With the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas is becoming the "third coast" of health and medical in the United States, particularly in cancer, genetics and neurology. The TMC’s innovation ecosystem focuses on biotechnology, diagnostics, digital health, medical devices and patient data management.
High tech (Austin): Called "Silicon Hills", the city of Austin competes with Silicon Valley and other world capitals for its dynamic innovation in IT technologies. Companies such as IBM, Dell, Freescale, AT&T and soon Apple are among the drivers of the local ecosystem. At the forefront of innovation are advanced electronics manufacturing (processors, memory, network architecture and multiplexing), data management (blockchain, deep learning) and more recently cyber security.
Great Lakes
Chicago, the largest city in the Midwest and its ecosystem has one of the fastest growing ecosystems in the United States.
If Chicago has historically developed around activities stemming from agricultural resources and biofuels, the city has become a hub in the fields of health and life sciences, web and mobile, telecommunications and information technologies, energy storage, Smart Grids, Clean Techs, cyber-infrastructures or even food industry and technology...
Chicago is one of the country’s largest university cities with a very dynamic and influential research cluster and a highly developed culture of technology transfer. More than 25% of US GDP is produced within a 500 km radius of Chicago, and 50% of all US goods and services are produced within a 700 km radius of the Illinois border and 45% of US consumers are located within 4 hours.
Finally, the Chicago region remains one of the leading air, road and rail centres in the United States.
Washington D.C. Region
The federal capital of the United States and its region (Maryland and Virginia) is home to the majority of the country’s national and international institutions: federal departments (defence, energy, etc.), major federal agencies (research, health, technology, oceans, etc.) and several international organizations (World Bank, IMF) have their headquarters there. The proximity of policy makers and regulators attracts many large companies, professional associations and non-profit organizations to Washington.
The Washington DC region is home to more than 20 universities, particularly renowned in the fields of defense, cybersecurity and health.
Maryland and Virginia have one of the highest STEM licensing rates in the country. The Dulles Technology Corridor, a cluster of defense and technology companies clustered in northern Virginia, accounts for half of the world’s Internet traffic and hosts more telecommunications and aerospace companies than anywhere else in the world.
Local governments are putting in place incentive policies for entrepreneurship and innovation. DC has major investors in technology and major women’s entrepreneurship networks.
Northeast Coast
Massachusetts is a center of academic and scientific excellence: more than 200 universities and institutions, including the most prestigious in the world (Harvard, MIT, etc.), representing a quarter of the American university potential.
Innovation is the main driving force behind the economy of this state, which is one of the six leading states in new technologies and innovation. Among the sectors particularly represented are health and biotech, robotics and cybersecurity.
The historical centre of the Netva programme, Boston, can benefit from an ecosystem of partners who are very involved and interested in the French winners. The French scientific presence is also very active there; French startups and scaleups have gathered under the banner of Frenchtech Boston.
Neighbouring states are following the same path as Massachusetts, with New York City investing in both biotech and fintech sectors, and Rhode Island combining quality of life and innovation around Brown University.
Bay area
The San Francisco Bay Area ecosystem is at the forefront of development for machine learning applications (for vehicle and robot autonomy, personalized medicine and the identification of new therapeutic molecules, anomaly detection, industrial process optimization) as well as everything related to new interfaces between humans and machines (virtual and augmented reality, neural communication, conversational assistants).
Silicon Valley is also in pole position on new approaches in medicine (regenerative, genome editing, personalized implants), on the advent of intermittent energies, on additive manufacturing and on technologies related to natural vastness (notably the ocean and space).
The program
The winners of the competition participate in a personalized program in 2 phases:
1. a training seminar in June in Paris on the approach to North American markets;
2. and an immersion stay at the beginning of November in one of the five most dynamic ecosystems in the United States: Massachusetts (Boston), Silicon Valley (San Francisco), Washington D.C., the Great Lakes region (Chicago) and Houston.
During this stay, entrepreneurs participate in seminars to confront their business model with the North American reality, individual meetings with key players in their field of activity and are invited to participate in events that allow them to highlight their project.
NETVA is a unique opportunity for young French companies to benefit from preparation and networking based on the expertise of local actors specialized in business development in the United States.
Since 2010, NETVA has supported more than 100 startups. In particular, each promotion benefited from the help of more than 30 experts to guide them in their search for contacts. Each winner was given 10 to 15 individualized appointments and all were introduced to the extensive network of contacts of the French Embassy in the United States.
The Science and Technology Department of the French Embassy in the United States relies on the support of partners in France for the implementation of the NETVA programme, the main ones being the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, Bpifrance and Business France. The program involves a total of about thirty partners in France and the United States.
