VivaTech 2026: what financial players taught us
Four days at Porte de Versailles, and one constant in conversations with insurers and banks: the constraint is no longer access to startups.
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VivaTech was held at Porte de Versailles from 17 to 20 June 2026. We spent most of the time in meetings with insurers, banks and social-protection groups, and one constant emerged.
The constraint has changed in nature
Five years ago, an insurer's difficulty was accessing relevant startups. That is no longer the case: innovation teams have well-stocked pipelines, acceleration programmes and up-to-date mappings.
The constraint is now downstream. Once the company is identified, no one has the capacity to deploy it. The pilot waits for a business line, the business line waits for a budget, the budget waits for an arbitration, and the startup, whose horizon is counted in months, wears out before the arbitration.
What this implies for a venture programme
A corporate-venture programme that stops at sourcing solves a problem the group no longer has. Value has moved to execution of the pilot: who introduces, who follows internally, who unblocks when procurement gets stuck.
That is an uncomfortable conclusion for many programmes, because sourcing is the visible and gratifying part, and pilot follow-up the ungrateful part.
A note on the format
The useful conversations took place in meetings, not on the stands. For an investment team, VivaTech is worth the density of decision-makers present within a five-hundred-metre radius, not what is said from the stages.