Ten years after it started as France’s answer to the world’s biggest technology fairs, VivaTech has become a place where Europe is making a case for the future, and the 2026 program was the most confident so far.
Every June, the southwest corner of Paris turns into the busiest crossroads of European technology.
VivaTech is the continent’s largest technology and startup festival, a four-day gathering at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles where inventors, investors, engineers, students, and heads of state share the same halls.
There is doing something deceptively simple: putting the people who are building the future in a room with people who can finance it, hire it, manage it, or buy it. Over the past decade, that vision has become one of the defining trends of the global tech calendar.
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The 2026 edition, held from June 17 to 20, was the 10th edition of the festival, and it was well dressed for the occasion. About 200,000 visitors passed through, up from about 180,000 in 2025.
To make room, organizers opened a new three-story Hall that added 40% more space and doubled last year’s seating.
The growth tells its own story: in ten years, VivaTech says its audience has grown nearly 300%, its initial population has tripled, and the number of investors passing through has multiplied nearly twelvefold.
The show launched in 2016 as France’s answer to the world’s biggest tech fair now stands, comfortably, as the biggest in Europe.
This year’s editorial theme set the tone: “Artificial Intelligence: impact, not illusion.”
It was a confident, mature framework, an invitation to look beyond the hype and celebrate AI delivering real, measurable results, and the four-day program delivered a lot of it. The subject action, appropriately, thought big.
Bezos, the Moon, and the idea of abundance
On the opening afternoon, Jeff Bezos took the main stage for 50 minutes alongside Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, in a session moderated by former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino.
The founder of Amazon used the slot not to talk about retail or even AI, exactly, but to make an argument about where humanity should place its industries.
He suggested that heavy, polluting industry should eventually leave the planet entirely, leaving what he called a “garden planet” that could be “returned to its pre-industrial state.”
The case, as Bezos and Limp put it in the shop, was that changing the space industry is the only situation where economic growth and environmental conservation really go hand in hand.
The Moon, in this narrative, is not a wasteland but a raw material: its surface holds the minerals needed to build orbital infrastructure, and its water ice can be converted into liquid oxygen for deep space travel at a fraction of the cost of launching propellant from Earth.
Limp added to the details he’s been making all week, recounting that Bezos had told him that Blue Origin could one day be a bigger company than Amazon.
It was the kind of growing, hopeful idea that VivaTech has on the platform, and the room responded in kind.
Bezos offered a line that captured the spirit of the festival better than any keynote slide: he said, there’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.
Coming from the founder of the most important company ever built, speaking to an auditorium full of people trying to build the next one, it remained an inspiration rather than a sales pitch.
The third way, it is made for cameras
The next day was about national politics. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi joined French President Emmanuel Macron on stage on June 18, with India serving as the event’s official AI Country Partner.
According to India’s account, its largest ever presence at the festival, with more than 80 high-tech companies and startups with portfolios covering digital public infrastructure, health technology, clean energy, mobility, and advanced computing.
Modi used the forum to outline a human-centered approach to AI governance, framed by a framework he promoted under the acronym MANAV, a road map focused on democratic values and priorities in the Global South.
The shared message from Paris and New Delhi, as the French company Info.fr describes it, was positive: Europe and India are charting their own path to self-confidence in AI, different from the American and Chinese models that dominate the field.
It’s a theme TNW has followed closely, as Europe races to resolve questions of AI sovereignty. It was a reminder of how far VivaTech has come, from a national trade show to a stage where two democracies put the same technological vision before a global audience.
Where were the real machines?
The festival floor was where “impact, not illusion” had to find its way, and the most talked about shows leaned heavily on the physical. Humanoid robots had a bigger presence than any year before.
Chinese company Unitree demonstrated a humanoid in collaboration with French neuro-AI startup HABS, including a live demonstration of non-invasive brain signals used to guide the robot.
French startup Enchanted Tools brought Mirokai, its articulated wheeled humanoid already tested in hospital settings, while PAL Robotics showed its TIago Pro and a new humanoid called Kangaroo, and China’s Agibot showed its Lingxi X2.
Not everything was robotic. A French company called Lifepods has drawn crowds with a personal survival capsule designed for flood zones, tsunami-prone coastlines, and earthquake zones, a product that has received little attention in the decade since it was introduced.
Audio startup Skyted showed off an earpiece designed to let people talk privately in noisy public spaces, and beauty company Perfect Corp showed off AI tools for personalized skin care and cosmetics.
The line, if there was one, was AI as pipes instead of spectacle, embedded in something you could touch.
Unicorn pipe
Of all the celebrity wattages, VivaTech’s clearest claim is its track record of spotting companies before they get big. The festival’s annual “Top 100 Next Unicorns” list, its five awards including the Female Founder Award and the AfricaTech Award, and its alumni list are parts of the program that survive the news cycle.
The festival notes that a third of the companies on its top list from 2019 to 2023 have already reached unicorn valuation.
The home crowd has new examples to point to. Pigment, a French business planning platform founded in 2019, crossed the $1bn mark to join the country’s short list of domestic unicorns, and was described by France 24 during the show.
Pasqal, a French company working on a neutral atom, closed a $100m round in early 2026 to reach unicorn status, months after appearing in the 2025 program.
Pennylane, a fintech that won its category at the previous VivaTech, has since done the same. These are the points data planners are reaching for, and they’re more important than ever in a year when French startup funding is shrinking as AI investment is concentrated.
A festival that grew
So did the anniversary program live up to its slogan? Usually, yes. The robots were real, the unicorns were real, and the decision to organize a festival around AI that delivered measurable results gave the whole event a sense of purpose.
The expansion of Hall 7 and the jump to 200,000 visitors are signs of an industry, and a continent, that is strong for what it creates.
What stood out the most was the range. In one place you can watch a billionaire sketch out an overflowing future on the runway, hear two democrats pitch a shared vision for AI, and walk down a few corridors to shake hands with a humanoid robot or meet the inventors of the next French unicorn. T
the width of the hat is the real success of VivaTech in 10: it has become the place where Europe gathers to have a great desire in sound. The first edition attracted 45,000 visitors who wanted to know what it was all about.
Ten years later, 200,000 came to help build the next one, and on the evidence of this year, they will be back.
