France's LightOn targets secure AI growth in Europe and Middle East

LightOn plans to expand in Europe and the Middle East, targeting sectors such as banking, defence and high-tech which require their data to be protected on local servers, the French company's co-CEO Laurent Daudet told Reuters.

Daudet pointed to banking, insurance, high-tech, defence, and healthcare, as prime targets for its custom AI models from LightOn, which counts Safran and the French Space Command among its customers.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and neighbouring countries were among the countries being looked at by LightOn, which made its stock market debut as Europe's first listed genAI company on the Euronext Growth exchange last week.

Orange, one of LightOn's partners, told Reuters last week that its customers want a French-trusted AI solution.

"Either they have particular governmental regulation restrictions, or they made their own business decision and would rather have the AI models running in an Orange data centre as opposed to a public cloud," said Orange AI Chief Steve Jarrett.

While other AI French startups like Mistral, Hugging Face or Dataiku raised funding from U.S. players such as Google, Amazon or Nvidia, LightOn opted to raise capital through a European listing.

Expansion beyond France into the Middle East is a key objective, Daudet said in an interview last week, as the region looks towards AI to reduce its reliance on oil revenue.

"Being European in this type of geography is interesting, it allows us to be neutral in the war of the giants that the Americans and the Chinese are waging, that can be an interesting position," he added.

The challenge facing LightOn, Daudet said, is fierce competition from much larger genAI players such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Mistral, adding that the company is seeking international distribution partnerships.

($1 = 0.9519 euros)

(This story has been refiled to remove the repetition of the word 'insurance' in paragraph 2)