Last week, we announced the 5 startups with the most potential – they got the chance to launch on stage at Paris Founders Event. Today, we are focusing on French companies that have the most impressive growth rate, thanks to the Next Web’s “Tech 5”. The criteria to be eligible are rather solid: startups no older than 5 years should have earned more than €500,000 in revenue last year, and must have built a scalable, technology-driven product. The Next Web announced the French winners a few days ago.
And the winners are…
LEETCHI
Leetchi is taking care of the problem of collecting money for group gifts. The success of the startup comes from the fact that it handles a very common issue with a very well-designed solution, hence their French leader status. Céline Lazorthes, its CEO, founded Leetchi at the end of 2009 and has since developed the company through impressive partnerships (for instance with Amazon) and through the launch of Mangopay, a payment solution for startups.
CREADS
Founded by Julien Mechin and Ronan Pelloux, Creads is an online marketplace for advertising and creative professionals. They handle logos, web-design, prints etc for clients by playing the role of the intermediary between them and a community of 500,000 creative talents – thus differentiating themselves from Behance or Dribbble. The startup raised $4.1 million (€3 million) from CM-CIC Capital Privé earlier this year.
KELBILLET
Kellbillet is basically the solution to find cheap tickets to travel. The platform is both a search engine and a intermediary for individual re-sellers, making sure that they always get the cheapest solution, from train to plane to car-sharing. The 2009-born startup won the Public Vote for Tech 5, which made Yann Raoul, founder of Kellbillet, very happy: “This new European fame is coming at the right time: we are planning on launching our service across Europe before the end of the year”.
UPLIKE
Previously “Doodoo” and co-founded by Emmanuel Françoise and Katherine Zymla, Uplike is the living proof than you can still create social apps today. Originally inspired by Evernote, the app is today rather a mix of Pinterest and Instagram – it’s a pictures / links / video sharing platform based on user-generated content and not curation. Very popular in the US, their goal is to straighten their market position.
LIMA
Lima is a small device that enables users to gather all their files, from any terminal, into one source of memory, therefore making it very easy to share documents between devices. They got noticed by raising more than $1,2 million dollars on their Kickstarter campaign, one of the biggest successes on the crowd funding platform.
The Next Web has announced all 7 European “Tech 5” in the past weeks and the official European ones will be announced at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam on April 24th and 25th. To go and support the FrenchTech finalists, you can still get tickets here!