Les Rencontres du Studio: how Inria helps future deeptech startups find their co-founders and advisors

Meetings and entrepreneurship

When you’re an entrepreneur, meetings are often essential and can play a decisive role in the destiny of the startup you’re creating.

When they start their year in the Inria Startup Studio, project leaders are often alone and with a limited network, especially in the sector in which they want to create their company.

Les Rencontres du Studio, organized in partnership with Matrice, provides an ideal opportunity to meet this challenge. Inspired by the “Find Your Cofounder” model, these events enable entrepreneurs to improve their chances of finding a complementary associate or advisor.

Finding a partner: a challenge worth taking

It is therefore essential to develop a quality entourage right from the start of this new adventure, covering various aspects of the project itself:

• psychological support from people you trust,
• competent operational support to enhance or avoid beginner’s mistakes,
• an accelerated understanding of the sector or market,
• easier development of contacts thanks to the network.

Finding a partner is a complex process that takes time and energy.

Developing the human circle around the entrepreneur also benefits the perception of the project. A team rather than a solo founder, or an advisory board made up of experienced start-up personalities, are all elements that give the project a reassuring dimension.

It’s essential to remember that fruitful encounters often happen by chance, so it’s important to multiply opportunities for exchange.

A major stake from ISS onwards

During the year of support from the Inria Startup Studio program, the studio’s founders are often looking for a future partner when they’re on their own, and almost always for advisors.

Unfortunately, making a good partnership acquaintance is not something that can be decreed, and no magic formula has yet been found to guarantee that a new relationship will get on well over the long term. This is not unique to entrepreneurship, but the stakes are undoubtedly higher in this fragile context.

In this field, there’s no substitute for hours of flying together to assess whether the various dimensions of the collaboration hold up. The challenge of shared experience has its own adage: “I can’t wait for the first crisis!”. This allows us to test whether the partnership can weather the storm (because we know there will be many). Multiplying opportunities to meet new people is undoubtedly the most important factor in increasing the chances of one of them becoming a long-term associate or advisor.

The “Find Your Cofounder” format

This is precisely what Find Your Cofounder (FYC) enables, a concept event created in 2018 by David Marques quickly joined by Raphaël de Toury and dedicated to helping deeptech entrepreneurs build a good team of associates with the best skills for their project.

The “Find Your Cofounder” format responds to these challenges by offering:

• Targeted pitches: Entrepreneurs present their project and the type of meetings they are looking for in 1mn30.
• A qualified audience: Audience participants are selected on the basis of their skills and interest in helping or joining a startup project in its early stages. From AI experts to business developers and experienced managers in different sectors, the motivation is common but the profiles are highly varied.
• Intense speedmeetings: These take place in the second half of the event, giving entrepreneurs 10 minutes face-to-face contact with all interested parties.

Inria was one of the very first players in deeptech entrepreneurship to support this initiative, so it seemed an obvious choice to collaborate with FindYourCofounder in order to give our project holders the benefit of this qualified networking boost.

As not all entrepreneurs are necessarily looking for a cofounder at the time of the program, we extended the concept to include advisor searches, offering a benefit for all. Les Rencontres du studio was born.

Already the 6th edition of Les Rencontres du Studio

Like the Inria Startup Studio scheme, which aims to enable a large number of digital scientists with a startup project to try their hand at entrepreneurship, it seemed that the number of ongoing projects in the program was the right opportunity to organize this adapted version of “Find Your Cofounder” especially for ISS entrepreneurs.

Since the 1st edition in March 2022 with the founding FYC team and since taken over by Matrice, ISS has already organized 6 editions of Les Rencontres du Studio, the last of which took place on January 23, 2025 from the new site of the Inria Paris Center in the 13th arrondissement of Paris.

At each event, project leaders from the 9 Inria centers in France pitch in the hope of meeting a co-founder and/or advisor.

Each event showcases around fifteen projects, with around 150 people in the audience, and over fifty speedmeetings in between. What’s more, the wealth of fields addressed by digital technology is reflected in the variety of projects supported by the program: health, wellbeing, environment, energy, entertainment, media, software, cybersecurity, internet services, e-commerce, mobility, industry 4.0, etc., among others.

With 16 projects and 71 speedmeetings at last event, Les Rencontres du studio is now:

– Over 1000 participants

– 80+ projects presented

– 450+ speed-meetings organized

Of course, many of these first contacts didn’t last, but this event is nevertheless regularly the place where ISS entrepreneurs meet the people who will lend a hand to their project, and sometimes even join it. Some projects have even met their first investor.

The search for a co-founder is a journey that requires patience and perseverance. Les Rencontres du Studio offers an ideal starting point for entrepreneurs, enabling them to meet complementary profiles and benefit from a network of experts.