The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, named F/ai.

On Tuesday, Station F announced it had partnered with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral, which it says marks the first time the firms are all participating in a single accelerator. Other partners include cloud and semiconductor companies AWS, AMD, Qualcomm, and OVH Cloud.

An accelerator is effectively a crash course for early-stage startups, whereby founders attend classes and lectures, consult with specialists, and receive introductions to potential investors and customers. The broad aim is to help startups bring ideas to market as quickly as possible.

The 20 startups in each F/ai cohort will undergo a curriculum geared specifically toward helping European AI startups generate revenue earlier in their lifecycle, in turn making it easier to secure the funding required to expand into the largest global markets. “We’re focusing on rapid commercialization,” says Roxanne Varza, director at Station F, in an interview with WIRED. “Investors are starting to feel like, ‘European companies are nice, but they’re not hitting the $1 million revenue mark fast enough.’”

The accelerator will run for three months, twice a year. The first edition began on January 13. Station F has not revealed which startups make up the cohort, but many were recommended by Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, or one of the other VC firms involved in the program. The startups are all building AI applications on top of the foundational models developed by the partnering labs, in areas ranging from agentic AI to procurement and finance.

In lieu of direct funding, participating founders will receive more than $1 million in credits that can be traded for access to AI models, compute, and other services from the partner firms.

With very few exceptions, European companies have so far lagged behind their American and Chinese counterparts at every stage of the AI production line. To try to close that gap, the UK and EU governments are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at attempts to support homegrown AI firms, and develop the domestic data center and power infrastructure necessary to train and operate AI models and applications.

In the US, tech accelerators like Y Combinator have produced a crop of household names, including Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and Reddit. OpenAI was itself established in 2015 with the help of funding from Y Combinator’s then research division. Station F intends for F/ai to have a similar impact in Europe, making domestic AI startups competitive on the international stage. “It’s for European founders with a global ambition,” says Varza.

The program also represents a chance for the US-based AI labs to sow further seeds in Europe, using subsidies to incentivize a new generation of startups to build atop their technologies.

Once a developer begins to build on top of a particular model, it is rarely straightforward to swap to an alternative, says Marta Vinaixa, partner and CEO at VC firm Ryde Ventures. “When you build on top of these systems, you’re also building for how the systems behave—their quirkiness,” she says. “Once you start with a foundation, at least for the same project, you’re not going to change to another.”

The earlier in a company’s lifecycle it begins to develop on top of a particular model, says Vinaixa, the more that effect is magnified. “The sooner that you start, the more that you accumulate, the more difficult it becomes,” she says.

A lot of people struggle to pronounce the name of American politician Pete Buttigieg. When Mick Baccio, now global security advisor at Splunk SURGe and Cisco Foundation AI, went to work for him in a previous life, it was helpfully spelled out in large letters on the office wall. Buttigieg says it ‘Boot-edge-edge’, if you were wondering.

“I was like, oh that’s clever, thank you for that,” says Baccio. “I’m going to meet the man in a second, I should know this!”

A former US Navy Reserve intelligence officer who began his political career as the mayor of South Bend in Indiana, Buttigieg served as secretary of transportation during the administration of US president Joe Biden, from 2021 to 2025.

However, before that, he had a tilt at the White House himself, running a primary campaign that won in the state of Iowa, before he dropped out at the start of March 2020 as the Democrats rallied behind Biden.

It was on this campaign that Baccio met Buttigieg, and in conversation with Computer Weekly, he reflects on the experience of bootstrapping cyber security for a US presidential campaign.

Baccio admits he was sceptical about taking the gig at first, having just escaped Washington DC himself after serving as a threat intelligence expert for the Executive Office of the President under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

“I got a call one day. They said, ‘Hey, do you want to come be CISO [chief information security officer] for the Buttigieg campaign?’ I said ‘no’. I was like, ‘I’m good’,” he says.

“When you look at a political campaign in the United States, win or lose, you’re going to be unemployed in November.”

Someone must have kept on at him, because the record shows he took the job, and even though “president Buttigieg” did not take the job, Baccio has no regrets about his choices.

“It’s the most fun you’ll have,” he says. “The closest thing to a political campaign, I think, is a startup, but a campaign is a most unique organisation because it’s a non-profit funded entirely by donations and its sole purpose is to elect your mascot.

“Now, I say mascot not in a mean way, but secretary Buttigieg was not involved in day-to-day operations. He didn’t run things in the campaign – he was the campaign. He’s not even the CEO, he’s who we are – we’re Pete for America.”

In such a campaign, the role of CISO takes on a fundamentally different aspect, says Baccio. To start with, most campaign staffers are volunteers, or in their first or second jobs after university. “Most of them don’t even know what a CISO is. I had to explain that a lot, why I was there and what I was doing – teaching folks how to ‘do the cybers’,” says Baccio.

Such a campaign faces challenges that large organisations with security budgets and supportive boards do not. For one thing, every dollar that a political campaign spends on something like cyber security, office furniture, or coffee and doughnuts is a dollar it is not spending on winning votes, so Baccio quickly learned he had to operate lean and operate cheaply.

But despite what tales of Russian espionage and interference in US election cycles might lead you to believe, the campaign faced a threat environment much like any ordinary business.

“I think one of the most under-appreciated threat vectors is just plain old fraud and business email compromise,” says Baccio.

“This is a $100bn a year industry, and we talk a lot about the agentic AI [artificial intelligence] threat, polymorphic-enabled malware, APT [advanced persistent threat], blah blah blah – everybody wants it to be that, but it’s generally fraud,” he adds.

“I never underestimate folks who are just trying to do their job. If your job is to process invoices, it’s all you do all day, if you get a PDF labelled ‘invoice’ you’re going to open it. Fraud is a bigger problem than any APT or AI attack, but I don’t think it’s sexy enough to get column inches.”