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Bets on AI growth in Europe and Middle East

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Targets sectors needing secure AI environments

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Faces competition from larger players

By Nathan Vifflin and Leo Marchandon

Dec 2 (Reuters) - 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 ( AMZN ) or Nvidia ( NVDA ), 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)