Four years in the French Tech 120 — and this year, the rules changed
Positive joins the French Tech 120 for the fourth consecutive year.
This year, the bar was raised
This renewal comes in an unprecedented context. The 7th cohort marks a break with previous selection criteria: investor backing is no longer enough. Selection now requires tangible proof of R&D — filed patents, research tax credits, public innovation support. A deliberate shift, redirecting the programme toward companies that genuinely invest in technology.
What we have built
For Positive, making this selection under these new criteria carries direct meaning. The group launched Positive Surfer this year, an AI Visibility Platform built on years of engineering work: its teams reverse-engineered Google's visibility algorithms, then applied the same approach to large language models — to understand what determines whether a brand is cited or not in responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity and their equivalents. This is not an AI feature bolted on. It is applied research infrastructure.
In the same movement, Uma, Positive's AI agent, orchestrates the entire marketing chain — from AI visibility to customer retention, across social media, email and CRM. Including the overlooked touchpoints: employees' daily emails, now integrated with the CRM, become activatable, segmented contact points aligned with brand strategy. A capability virtually absent from the market.
A marketing chain built to leave nothing out
What the 2026 programme recognises is a core conviction: building independent European technologies that address a real problem — the fragmentation of marketing tools and the inability of current stacks to function as a coherent whole. Positive Surfer, Positive User, Positive Iconosquare, Positive rapidmail, Positive noCRM, Positive Signitic and Uma: each piece was designed to fit with the others, not to stand alone.
What comes next?
Three consecutive cohorts in a programme whose criteria have tightened: this is a trajectory, not a one-off result. And there is still a great deal to build.
