With 16m visitors expected over two weeks, more than 200 countries represented and just over six months until the opening ceremony, pressure is ramping up for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games to go smoothly — and French startups are determined to be part of the fun.
From the hospitality industry to urban security, tech is being put to work to help manage the huge logistical challenges posed by an event of such size as the Olympics.
That’s a major business opportunity for startups — in fact, it’s billions of euros worth of contracts and partnerships to cover services ranging from sports infrastructure to catering, through mobility, entertainment and tourism.
For smaller businesses, it also means an unprecedented reputational boost.
“It’s an image catalyst,” says Emilie Gazeau, the CEO of Alltheway, a startup that offers luggage pick-up and drop-off from city centres. “If you show you can handle the Olympic Games, you can make it anywhere.”
Working with the IOC
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) — the non-governmental organisation that has been managing the Games for over a century — is not known to be particularly startup-friendly. In fact, it works mostly with large multinationals that can pay hefty sums of money for the rights to market themselves as Games partners, such as Coca-Cola, Deloitte or Visa.
One French startup has still managed to take a share of the pie. Physical training platform Kinomap, a startup that provides virtual environments for indoor exercise, recently secured a licensing agreement with the IOC that will enable the company to provide users with the same virtual itineraries as Olympic athletes.
The startup expects this will generate up to 1m new user accounts in the next seven months — which compares to an average 400k new accounts per year.
Partnering with the IOC was a big opportunity to play in the big leagues, but it came with challenges, says Kinomap’s CEO Philippe Moity. For a small company of about 30 people, the cost of the licence, which is undisclosed, was hefty — and the marketing and sales resources now required to promote the partnership are significant.
“We're very small to be doing what we are doing,” says Moity. “Other partner companies have teams of 20 working on this. If I dedicated 20 people, there’d be no one left to work at Kinomap.”
Partnering with the IOC remains off the cards for most smaller businesses. Much more accessible is Paris 2024, the body that is in charge of organising the Olympics in the French capital.
The organisation is a private company made up of several members, including the IOC, but it is answerable to the French central government. It manages almost €5bn worth of public contracts — deals that it has pledged to hand, in part, to smaller businesses across the country.
Up to 1,200 contracts have been given to SMEs through public tenders so far, according to the organisation. Sifted has learned, for example, that Paris 2024 contracted French sports startup Sport Heroes to provide the app to support the Olympics’ “Marathon for All” — a 42km race open to the general public.
Unlike IOC partners, however, these companies do not have the right to publicly market themselves as providers of Games services.
Partnering with the bigger players
For some, the Olympics’ real opportunity for startups lies in partnering with large companies that are under pressure to improve their services during an intense period of activity.
Luggage logistics startup Alltheway, for instance, has signed partnerships with Paris airport operator Groupe ADP and public transport company RATP.
“These big companies are not agile, they can’t innovate as fast, so they come and see startups to increase their value proposition for the Games,” says Alltheway’s CEO Emilie Gazeau. “Innovation during the Olympics has really been financed by those large groups.”
She expects to see Alltheway’s volume of activity triple during July and August 2024.
Similarly, Quentin Brackers de Hugo, the founder of HostnFly — a startup that provides concierge services for house rentals such as key drop and cleaning — says that the company is in talks with accommodation providers like Airbnb who are hoping to expand their offer during the Games.
HostnFly has already seen the number of Paris rental ads for the Games quadruple on the platform and the founder expects that the Olympics will generate up to €8m — an estimated 15-20% of the company’s turnover for 2024.
The French government has played a significant role in facilitating discussions between startups and larger corporations, according to both founders. Last summer, for example, the “French Travel Tech” programme was launched by the Ministry of Finance: its objective was to ensure startups in the travel sector would benefit from business opportunities during the Olympics.
Both HostnFly and Alltheway participated in the programme, giving the companies direct access to top executives at large companies.
“The idea was to enable partnerships to mature in the context of the Games and to maximise the benefits for startups,” says Brackers de Hugo.
Startups for security
With the sudden influx of millions of visitors in the French capital next summer, security is another sector that has received plenty of government focus — and here, too, startups are expected to play a significant role.
The security of the Games is managed by the Interior Ministry — which, as early as 2020, announced that it would work together with the private sector to experiment with new technologies that showed potential to help with the safety of the event. The government pledged that a third of these partnerships would be signed with SMEs and startups.
One technology stood out as particularly promising: the use of AI-powered cameras that can recognise specific events like abnormal crowd densities or the start of a fire. A new law was controversially passed last year to allow the experimental use of the technology for security purposes during the Olympics and until March 2025.
Three French startups have now been selected by the government to provide AI-powered video surveillance during the Games — Wintics, Videtics and ChapsVision.
Wintics founder Matthias Houllier says that the deal could represent up to €4m extra turnover for the company — and is a real boost for a smaller business, which was bidding for the deal against some of the country’s “biggest security companies”.
“It gives us legitimacy in a brand-new market,” says Houllier. “And it really shines a spotlight on our company.”
“The Games are a great international showcase for us.”
