LightOn
French publicly traded company developing enterprise language models and the Paradigm AI deployment platform.
📍 France 🇫🇷, Paris
Product overview
LightOn develops language models and an enterprise AI platform from Paris. Founded in 2016, it became the first European generative AI company to go public, listing on Euronext Growth Paris in November 2024 (ticker: ALTAI) at a €62 million market capitalization. The company reported €1.74 million in revenue for fiscal year 2025. LightOn has trained over 12 large language models on European supercomputers, including Alfred-40B and contributions to the open-source BLOOM project (176B parameters). The company developed ModernBERT (with AnswerAI), which reached top performance on retrieval benchmarks and has been downloaded over 20 million times, along with specialized models like BioClinical ModernBERT for biomedical text and LightOnOCR for document processing. The Paradigm platform is the commercial product, providing enterprise search, chat, and retrieval-augmented generation on private data. It processes multi-format documents including images, diagrams, tables, and handwritten notes. Paradigm deploys in approximately 43 minutes and supports on-premise, private cloud, SaaS, and air-gapped configurations. Features include team agents, knowledge connectors for SharePoint, Drive, and Confluence, and tool chaining for multi-step tasks. Paradigm holds SOC 2 Type 1 and ISO 27001 certifications. Clients include Safran, the French Space Agency (CNES), Groupama, and Europrop International. KEY FEATURES: - Over 12 language models trained on European supercomputers, including open-source ModernBERT - Paradigm enterprise platform with RAG, visual document processing, and team agents - On-premise, private cloud, SaaS, and air-gapped deployment options - SOC 2 Type 1, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance - First European generative AI company listed on a public stock exchange