FW.MEDIA scales up: European deeptech and an English-language flagship edition
To contact us: editorial@fw.media
For nearly twenty years, we have covered the forces reshaping technology in France, Europe and around the world.
Today, FW.MEDIA is entering a new phase.
Our geography is not changing. Our focus is.
FW.MEDIA is sharpening its editorial mission around the technologies that are becoming strategic to economies, industries and nations: artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, semiconductors, quantum technologies, defence, space, robotics, energy, biotech and the next generation of digital infrastructure.
These technologies can no longer be understood through the lens of innovation alone.
They are now about economic power, industrial capacity and technological sovereignty.
They are about who controls computing infrastructure, who finances the next generation of factories, who owns critical intellectual property, where strategic components are manufactured and which countries are able to turn scientific breakthroughs into companies operating at global scale.
This is the new technology era we want FW.MEDIA to document.
Europe has no shortage of scientific and engineering talent.
It has world-class universities and laboratories, strong industrial companies, ambitious founders and increasingly sophisticated investors.
But Europe still faces a structural challenge: turning that scientific and technological strength into global companies, industrial capacity and strategic assets that remain anchored on the continent.
The same questions now sit behind almost every major technological breakthrough.
Where was the technology developed?
Who funded it?
Where are its chips, machines or components manufactured?
Who owns the infrastructure required to operate it?
Who becomes its first major customer?
And when the company scales, where do the jobs, intellectual property, industrial capacity and economic value ultimately end up?
These questions will increasingly define FW.MEDIA’s editorial agenda.
The repositioning we began earlier this year now comes with another major change:
FW.MEDIA’s English-language European edition is becoming the group’s flagship publication.
The reason is straightforward: the companies we cover are already European before they are national.
A startup founded in Paris can raise capital in London, recruit engineers in Berlin, collaborate with a research institute in Switzerland, deploy computing infrastructure in the Nordics and find its first large customers in the United States or Asia.
Deeptech companies may emerge from national ecosystems, but their capital, talent, supply chains, infrastructure and markets quickly become international.
Looking at these companies only through the prism of their home country no longer tells the full story.
FW.MEDIA’s English-language edition is therefore designed to cover Europe as a technology and industrial system in its own right.
That means looking at its strengths, but also at its dependencies.
Its laboratories and startups, but also its factories.
Its venture capital ecosystem, but also its growth capital gap.
Its industrial policies, procurement strategies, computing infrastructure, supply chains and ability to create companies that can remain competitive as they scale globally.
Our ambition is not to build another general-interest European startup publication.
We want to follow the technologies, companies and industrial ecosystems that could materially change markets, economic power and Europe’s position in the world.
That also means looking far beyond Europe.
The United States, China and other major technology powers remain essential to understanding the forces reshaping global industries.
Europe cannot be analysed in isolation.
Its progress must constantly be measured against ecosystems that deploy more capital, build infrastructure faster, create larger domestic markets or industrialise technologies at a different speed.
That comparative perspective will remain central to FW.MEDIA.
At the same time, FW.MEDIA/FR retains an essential role.
As the successor to FRENCHWEB, our French-language edition will continue to cover the companies, investors, policies and transformations shaping the French technology ecosystem.
But its focus will also evolve.
Deeptech and strategic technologies will take a larger place, with greater emphasis on their economic, industrial and geopolitical implications.
The two editions are not intended to mirror or simply translate one another.
FW.MEDIA/FR will continue to examine France in depth.
The English-language edition will operate at the European level: connecting ecosystems, comparing national strategies and giving greater international visibility to the founders, researchers, investors and industrial companies building Europe’s next generation of technologies.
Behind all of this sits one question that will increasingly shape our work:
Can Europe turn scientific and technological excellence into economic and industrial power?
Answering it requires moving beyond funding announcements, startup rankings and technology hype.
It means following where factories are built.
Who provides growth capital.
Which companies win major industrial contracts.
How governments use public procurement.
Who controls computing infrastructure.
How supply chains are structured.
How technologies move from laboratories into companies.
Who acquires strategic startups.
And, above all, which companies succeed in crossing the difficult gap between scientific breakthrough and deployment at industrial scale.
That is the territory FW.MEDIA intends to cover.
We remain based in Paris, but our editorial horizon is increasingly European and global.
Covering European technology is only the starting point.
Understanding whether Europe can turn technology into industrial capacity, economic power and global influence is becoming the core of our editorial mission.
Richard Menneveux
Editor in Chief, FW.MEDIA