Station F, a Paris-based startup hub founded by French billionaire Xavier Niel, is gearing up for a new edition of its F/ai accelerator program in a bid to strengthen its positioning as a springboard for promising AI startups.

Launched in January this year, F/ai plans to launch its second batch this September, aiming to help a handful of AI-focused startups go from initial products to real revenue in a matter of weeks.

Spanning 538,000 square feet, Station F is often described as a co-working space, but its footprint extends beyond the physical space, its director Roxanne Varza told TechCrunch.

One example is Station F’s annual Future 40 selection, in which the team names the most promising teams from around 1,000 companies it receives each year. By 2024, TechCrunch noted that almost all of that annual cohort incorporated AI into their core business.

Station F today has a front-row seat to the rise of AI startups, taking advantage of its position as a cornerstone of “French Tech.” The startup hub has also successfully leveraged its position to capture equity stakes in its Future 40 companies. “We have been investing [in these companies] from 2022,” Varza said.

Aided by both its size and Niel’s connections, Station F has become a frequent stop for officials looking to connect with Europe’s tech scene, with no fewer than 11 presidential visits since President Macron’s inaugural tour in 2017. It has also welcomed big AI names like Sam Altman, and is now leveraging these ties for F/ai.

The first cohort of the F/ai program was backed by a long list of major tech companies (AMD, Anthropic, AWS, Clay, Google, G42, Hugging Face, Lovable, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, OVHcloud, Snowflake, and Qualcomm), not to mention several venture capital funds.

The second cohort will add some bigger names, TechCrunch found: Eleven Labs, Nebius, Rippling, OpenRouter, HubSpot and GitHub.

“The goal was to bring together all the main players and make it much easier for [AI] startups looking to launch in Europe to connect with them,” Varza said.

Two teams from the first generation of the accelerator have already obtained international recognition: Alpic, which won the world grand final of The Pitch, a competition organized by Deel; and Rippletide, which won the OpenAI Codex Hackathon.

While prizes rarely hurt, especially when they bring funding, F/ai is focused on helping its cohort generate revenue, aiming for €1 million (about $1.14 million) in six months. “We had heard quite a bit of criticism about the slow pace of commercialization of European startups,” Varza said. “This puts them on par with what investors see in the US.”

Investors seem to like what they’ve seen so far. The first cohort collectively raised $34 million in seed funding, according to Station F. The teams’ track records may also have helped: 80% of these 20 AI startups were founded by repeat entrepreneurs, a third of whom have PhDs.

The founder profile leans that way mainly because F/ai selects its cohort exclusively through recommendations from founders, partners and investors, a process that could increase the exclusivism and elitism of which France’s tech scene is sometimes accused.

But while teams can’t apply directly, they can contact one of F/ai’s many partners, and perhaps soon alumni, Varza said. He added that Station F has 30 other programs that startups can apply to.

Access appears to be a key focus for F/ai, which in the past has welcomed the likes of Turing Award winner Yann LeCun for private chats. “Nowadays, if founders here want to talk to people at this level, everyone seems to think that they need to go to the United States and join a program there. We actually want to show that you can stay here and do it from here,” Varza said.