The ISS onboarding, the beginning of a community ?

Inria Startup Studio has the particularity of selecting and welcoming its entrepreneurs on an ongoing basis. The selection committee meets once a month and the selected teams are recruited by Inria immediately afterwards, generally a month or two after the committee meeting. There is no annual or biannual promotion as is often the case in other schemes such as YCombinator which organizes two yearly 3-month programs.

In 2024, 44 projects were selected, 20 in the first half of the year and then 24 in the second half of the year. 10 projects (representing 14 people) entered the program between November 1, 2023 and January 1 of this year, and 12 projects in the following months in 2025 (for 21 people). In the past, this entry point was symbolically initiated by a “kickoff” between the entrepreneurs, the startup managers and the co-designers. For about a year, the project leaders of a given quarter have been invited to the CyberCampus in Paris la Défense for this symbolic start.

The program is presented and, perhaps more importantly, it gives the opportunity to these fifteen and more individuals to get to know each other and create a first sense of belonging to a community, not to say a promotion. Surprisingly enough, these projects came from the 9 Inria centers. This meeting allows for a clear rapprochement and a connection between people who would not have naturally met outside their respective centers.

Discovering a new world

Whether you come from the research universe as a young doctoral student or permanent researcher, whether you just finished your studies as a young graduate or whether you come from the business world, the world of startups is often unknown, not to say mysterious or even fantasized. It is certainly varied, very diverse.

The media may talk (too much and too loudly?) about this world, we still have the feeling that it is poorly understood. A startup is not a company as Steve Blank says, it is an exploratory adventure, it is digging a tunnel without knowing the size of the mountain, building a bridge without seeing the opposite bank.

It is not about scaring startup future entrepreneurs, but on the contrary to show them that it are no recipes to be mastered, but to accept living in the unknown, the uncertain and to learn, and that success will also be linked to luck.

In this respect, we share with them topics that we know well and already presented on this blog such as startup culture or the French entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Discovering the ISS program

Inria Startup Studio has had its “little music” for over five years: it bets on talent and less on technologies by giving great autonomy of decision to the these apprentices. Technology remains essential and without a strong scientific or technological background that they master, these teams would be very helpless in our progral. The role of the twenty or so support staff at ISS is to promote, to amplify this positioning. It is not about providing access to the technologies developed by Inria researchers, but rather to promote a culture change, to think above all about the users of the envisaged product, the future customers before designing this product.

Autonomy does not mean isolation. Our startup managers are always available for the projects in this uncertain exploration. The program is rich in tools, of which onboarding is the first offered to the project leaders in a twelve-month timeline. Thus, these individuals are systematically encouraged to discover the outside world, “their market”, by pitching their project as often as possible, by participating in internal events (our camps, our Fête des Startups) and external events (Vivatech, Hello Tomorrow, TechnFest, etc.) to confront the “reality of the market” (when it exists).

See again the blog article https://www.inriastartupstudio.fr/en/deeptech-the-scientist-is-necessarily-the-first-entrepreneur/

Sharing the experience of our alumni

In January 2024, two former ISS entrepreneurs shared without mincing their experience of twelve months of support within ISS.

On January 14, Marielle Péré (a young PhD from the University of Côte d’Azur) recounted the adventure of CellEmax, a tech-bio (and not a biotech!) More here.

On January 15, it was Brij Mohan (doctor of the University of Lille), founder of Nijta, whose testimony you can find here or there :

For the second onboarding of the year, we had the pleasure of hearing Manuel Pariente (doctor from the University of Lorraine), who has just sold his startup Pulse Audition to Essilor after working at ISS in 2021, then Nicolas Turpault (also a doctor from the University of Lorraine and founder of Sonaide).

The feedback from the project leaders is valuable. They experienced things differently, they had preconceived ideas about expectations and often changed over the course of a year. What sometimes seemed important to them may have seemed less so later; conversely, with experience, they would have given more importance to other subjects (contacting prospects, “pitching” their project for example)

And getting to know each other

The “CPPI” (six startup managers from the centers) and three “co-designers” (ISS managers) were present in January in addition to the fifteen project leaders. But this article would miss its goal if it did not present the projects (the list of which can be found on the portfolio page of this site)

• AXIOM – Rémi Felin and Arnaud Barbe (Sophia Antipolis)
• A4LL – Cyriel Mallart (Rennes)
• FloFixer – Rania Jebri and Wided Chandoul (Nancy)
• Manifest – Sébastien Conejo and Bruno Pérez (Grenoble)
• Physicae – Julien Mellet (Rennes)
• Polyphonic – Maxime Popoff (Lyon)
• Protomia – Andres Arteaga and Philippe Tran (Lille)
• Sacy – Camille Pereira and Chloé Daudier (Paris)
• Sand Fox – Nassim Bouiche (Bordeaux)
• Skin Bionics – Hernán Morales (Lille)

And in March,

• Akhet – John Hanna (Rennes)
• Allendia -Hugo Chateau-Laurent and Tara Vanhatalo  (Bordeaux)
• Augura Space – François Ginisty and Hadrien Mariaccia (Paris)
• Balafenn – Simon Pageaud and Antoine Ollivier (Rennes)
• CYGON – Gabriel Fontaine and Yann Sellier (Grenoble)
• Forge de l’ingénieur – Emmanuel Chébbi and Frédéric Collonval (Rennes)
• Green Field IT – Marc Feld and Salih Taner (Nancy)
• Mirai – Nacim Belkhir (Saclay)
• SensiPH – Claude Kengoum (Paris)
• TerraNeon – Jean-Daniel Kant, Maël Franceschetti and Cédric Herpson (Paris)
• Verare – Victor Rodrigo Mercado et Diane Dewez (Rennes)
• Vitidrone – Titien Cubilier (Bordeaux)

And then ?

Onboarding is just the beginning. Twelve months is a long time and yet very short at the same time. The entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to explore their project in a certain comfort (they are employed, housed, supported) and discover if their bet is worth pursuing. Some will stop, others will want to continue without finding sufficient resources to do so and the luckiest will have found investors or customers to continue this adventure. No one can say at this stage where they will be 12 months later. We have had too many surprises compared to our initial hypotheses. Giving a chance to a significant number of projects also comes from this knowledge (or rather this lack of knowledge) and we hope that our supervisors and future sponsors agree with this observation. Entrepreneurship is not the analysis of a situation, it is above all an exciting and enthusiastic call to action. These individuals will come out of it transformed and enriched in any case. Welcome to our new project leaders!