CEA
25 Rue Leblanc, Paris, Ile-de-France, 75015, France
Overview
CEA is a French government-funded technological research organisation. A prominent player in the European Research Area, it is involved in setting up collaborative projects with many partners around the world. The CEA is the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives). It is a public body established in October 1945 by General de Gaulle. A leader in research, development and innovation, the CEA mission statement has two main objectives: To become the leading technological research organization in Europe and to ensure that the nuclear deterrent remains effective in the future. The CEA is active in four main areas: low-carbon energies, defense and security, information technologies and health technologies. In each of these fields, the CEA maintains a cross-disciplinary culture of engineers and researchers, building on the synergies between fundamental and technological research. The total CEA workforce consisted of 15 838 employees. Across the whole of the CEA (including both civilian and military research), there were 1556 PhD students and 293 post-docs. The CEA is based in ten research centers in France, each specializing in specific fields. The laboratories are located in the Paris region, the Rhône-Alpes, the Rhône valley, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, Aquitaine, Central France and Burgundy. The CEA benefits from the strong regional identities of these laboratories and the partnerships forged with other research centers, local authorities and universities.
- Total investments
- 2
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 7
Sector focus
- Energy
- Information Technology
- National Security
- Security
Investment portfolio
- WORMSENSING
Participated · Equity · Oct 2022
Wormsensing, founded in 2020 as a spin‑off of CEA‑LETI, develops ultra‑sensitive vibration sensors that are highly integrable and operate with zero energy consumption (passive technology). Its sensors claim a thousandfold sensitivity improvement and take an adhesive, patch‑like form factor that can be applied to many materials and environments. The technology is positioned across multiple industries including aerospace, automotive, transport, energy, manufacturing, robotics and healthcare, and has been tested and approved for various automotive uses. Wormsensing describes benefits such as faster product design cycles, improved quality control, earlier failure detection for predictive maintenance, and new human‑machine interface and physiological‑measurement applications. After two years of technology validation and placing an initial sensor on the market, the company plans to accelerate industrial and commercial development. The startup intends to use new funding to finance its first manufacturing site and to start a production line in France.
- Prophesee
Participated · Series B · Oct 2016
Prophesee develops event-based vision technologies—sensors, cameras and software—that detect and process motion as asynchronous events rather than conventional frames. The company has evolved its product set into integrated systems such as Mantara, an event-based drone detection and tracking system that the firm says has been validated in the field, and Hearth, a new software platform intended to replace OpenEB and the Metavision SDK for secure, updateable, event-based applications. Prophesee highlights roughly a hundred patents and more than ten years of technology development, and it sells into industry, security and defense markets with use cases spanning airports, critical infrastructure and counter-UAS. The firm has commercial partnerships (for example with IDS Imaging) and a memorandum of understanding with Exosens to extend sensing beyond visible wavelengths. Prophesee is based in Paris and maintains offices in Grenoble, Shanghai and Tokyo, and the company reports a strategic shift toward a full-stack, dual civil and military strategy following the recent funding round.