LightOn

About LightOn

LightOn is a French generative AI company founded in 2016 in Paris and headquartered there. In November 2024 it became the first pure-play generative AI company to list on Euronext Growth Paris (ticker ALTAI), positioning itself as a flagship of Europe's sovereign AI movement. Its core product, Paradigm, is a turnkey enterprise GenAI platform providing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), intelligent agents, document analysis, and custom assistants over an organisation's own data. Paradigm's defining feature is its deployment model: rather than sending data to an external API, LightOn brings the AI to the customer's data. The platform can be installed on-premise, inside a customer VPC, or in fully air-gapped environments, keeping all data within the client's own security perimeter. This makes it suitable for highly sensitive public-sector and regulated enterprise workloads — customers include the Île-de-France region, Safran, Groupama, CNES (French space agency), and the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques. LightOn has trained more than a dozen large language models since 2020 and publishes notable open-source models and libraries (including ModernBERT, BioClinical ModernBERT, and PyLate). Paradigm is model-agnostic and can run open-weight models within the customer's perimeter, so no customer data is used to train shared models. The company holds SOC 2 Type 1 certification and states full GDPR and EU AI Act compliance. Because it is an EU-incorporated, Euronext-listed French company with no US parent, and because its architecture defaults to in-perimeter deployment, LightOn scores very strongly on data sovereignty. The main caveats for the most demanding French public-sector buyers are that its published certification is SOC 2 Type 1 (not Type II) and that ANSSI SecNumCloud qualification appears to be a positioning goal rather than a confirmed, published qualification at the time of writing.