Creative Next: the winner will be chosen on Feb. 8th [fr]

Business France overview

Business France is the national agency supporting the international development of the French economy, responsible for fostering export growth by French businesses, as well as promoting and facilitating international investment in France. It promotes France’s companies, business image and nationwide attractiveness as an investment location, and also runs the VIE international internship program. Founded on Jan. 1, 2015, through a merger between UBIFRANCE and the Invest in France Agency, Business France has 1,500 personnel, both in France and in 70 countries throughout the world, who work with a network of public- and private-sector partners.

Créative France overview

Créative France is a global campaign to profile French entrepreneurship and creativity, in the United States. The program highlights France’s position at the forefront of innovation across industry sectors, including technology, design, education, aviation and gastronomy. Créative France aims to boost the growth of French companies abroad, strengthen the country’s attractiveness to investors and uphold France’s reputation as an exceptional place for doing business.

The Creative Next Challenge

Créative Next is a social media contest that seeks to find the next face of Créative France. Créative Next was open to French entrepreneurs registered / established in the United States, particularly those who are demonstrating unparalleled creativity and excellence.

To enter, companies needed only to share a short video, picture or presentation that illustrates how it is both creative and ground-breaking on Twitter using the hashtag #CreativeNextUS.

The U.S. winner will join winners from other countries around the globe and be featured in an upcoming Créative France advertising campaign. This individual’s creative campaign will showcase his/her company and accomplishments. The winner will also be profiled in an interview on social media and the Créative France website.

Winners from other countries:

 Francecol (India): E-wheel, an electrical motor for bicycles for easier and smarter trips
 Asiance (Korea): Brand enhancer in Korea, creates new reality by associating cultural and technological demands of Asian Markets
 Luxury Business Institute (Korea): Cutting edge consulting and training solutions for the luxury business
 10-Vins (Singapore): D-Vine, the first wine tasting device adapted to each wine package in flacons
 AKKA Technologies (United Arab Emirates): Link&Go, innovative solutions for the car of the future
 Devialet (United Kingdom): Phantom, the best sound in the world

The US Entries

Algama

Location: Brooklyn, NY
Founders: Gaëtan Gohin, Alvyn Severien, Mathieu Goncalves
Business Sector: Food

ALGAMA is committed to creating and producing alternative foods, imagining next-generation everyday foods made from microalgae, due to their unique nutritional value. ALGAMA’s core activity is the creation of ingredients and innovative products derived from the properties of microalgae. The Research & Development department’s first task is to identify and select microalgae with unique attributes so that they can be used to develop consumer products. The R&D team works closely with the marketing and culinary teams, so ALGAMA is able to develop and deliver innovative and tasty food products with high market potential while overcoming the constraints and technological barriers involved in extracting the nutrients contained in microalgae for the food sector.

Augment

Location: Orlando, FL/New York, NY
Founders: Jean-Francois Chianetta, Mickaël Jordan, Cyril Champier
Business Sector: Technology (Augmented Reality)

Augment is a leader in the augmented reality space, with more than 200 clients in 36 countries. Augment now has over 40 employees from 14 different countries. We’re a diverse, happy bunch of people working together to build the best augmented reality solution to professionals, through our SaaS (Software as a Service) platform. Our mission is to seamlessly merge our physical and virtual experiences. Together, we want to change the way people see and imagine the world around them.

Blue Frog Robotics

Location: Boston, MA / San Francisco, CA
Founders: Rodolphe Hasselvander, Franck De Visme
Business Sector: Robotics

Blue Frog Robotics, developer of BUDDY, “The Companion Robot”, was co-founded by former CRIIF (Robotics lab) Executive Director Rodolphe Hasselvander and Franck De Visme, Serial Entrepreneur. Founded as a spin-off of the CRIIF, we have extensive experience in industrial and service robotics. We bring BUDDY to the world by opening the platform to developers, universities, educational institutes and research laboratories. Because you can develop your own applications, BUDDY will continue to grow and interact with you more than you can imagine! Our goal is to design and develop robots that are accessible to everyone and help people live easier and safer, and have fun.

Cedexis

Location: Portland, OR, New York, NY, San Francisco, CA
Founders: Julien Coulon
Business Sector: Internet management and monitoring

Cedexis is an international company delivering Cloud-based Web Traffic Optimization. It optimizes web performance across data centers, content delivery networks (CDNs) and clouds, for companies that want to ensure 100% availability and extend their reach to new global markets. Its mission is to make the web faster for every user on the planet.

CommunicoTool

Location: San Francisco, CA
Founders: Frédéric Guibet
Business Sector: Technology (App)

CommunicoTool is a French startup specializing in communication applications. The founder, who has an autistic daughter, quickly realized that the tablet was to his child what a wheelchair is to someone affected by motor disabilities. He decided to create a communication app for tablets aimed at people, like his daughter, who face challenges from their speech impediments. CommunicoTool makes it easy for non-verbal children to find their words.

Hemarina

Location: Boston, MA
Founders: Franck Zal
Business Sector: Biotech

Hemarina SA is a privately held biotechnology company centered on the research and development of marine oxygen carriers for therapeutic and industrial applications. Hemarina offers products that constitute a decisive technological breakthrough in regard to current or past developments of hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs). Hemarina positions itself as a R&D company focused on oxygen carrier molecules that have therapeutic and industrial applications. Our products have high-value market applications for which there are no true competitors — only potential partners. Therefore our business model revolves around finding win-win partnerships with life sciences or pharmaceutical companies who wish to incorporate Hemarina’s technology in their medical devices or drug development process.

Michel et Augustin

Location: Brooklyn, NY
Founders: Augustin Paluel-Marmont, Michel de Rovira
Business Sector: Food

Michel et Augustin’s mission is to make the world smile, whipping up delicious yet healthy products made from simple, quality ingredients found in your very own kitchen and by sharing adventures with consumers and partners who will reproduce them. In the beginning, Michelin and Augustin started out testing (and tasting) more than 400 recipes in Augustin’s little kitchen and Michel’s mother’s slightly larger kitchen. They did everything themselves, from choosing and buying the ingredients, to creating the recipes, to baking and delivering the cookies. Their goal is to offer consumers delicious products with real taste and the highest standards in quality ingredients.

Sponsorise.me

Location: Miami, FL
Founders: Loïc Yviquel, Gilles Dumas
Business Sector: Funding (sports)

Sponsorise.Me is the first Worldwide social sponsoring platform dedicated to sports projects. Our mission: let all the sports project owners finance their dreams naturally thanks to associations, companies, public organisms and the crowd. Nowadays, we believe that fans are becoming more and more engaged and they are willing to contribute to many projects. At Sponsorise.Me, we are sure that sports have s special power that gathers and lets people share their happiness. It has lead us to create a new kind of sponsorship: social sponsoring. Professional or not, for leisure or for a club, sports take an important place in your life. Do you have a sports project you wish to realize? Sponsorise.Me can help you to finance it by guiding you along a crowdfunding campaign.

Voluntis

Location: Cambridge, MA
Founders: Pierre Leurent, Romain Marmot, Etienne Vial
Business Sector: Healthcare Technology

Voluntis teams seek to invent secure, collaborative and patient-centric digital health solutions with a unique combination of web and mobile development excellence, medical and regulatory expertise and certified quality-oriented processes. With more than 600,000 patients managed and more than 50 programs deployed, our track record speaks for itself. Voluntis is guided by four values: patient focus, passion for innovation, respect and integrity and drive for excellence. Voluntis firmly believes that the unprecedented advancement of information technologies will contribute to solving certain healthcare system issues,notably related to chronic disease expansion.