Station F and Anthropic say the AI boom is pulling founders back in person
Speaking on a panel at Wave by Vento in Turin, Station F director Roxanne Varza and Anthropic's EMEA startup sales head Aiden Blake said the AI boom is drawing more founding teams back to physical offices. Station F hosts 1,000 early-stage companies at all times, and its F/ai programme, launched in February, lets teams go hybrid but requires them on site for key moments; about two-thirds of the current batch is non-French. Blake said trust and access to capital happen in person, and Anthropic runs its EMEA startup support from Dublin with roughly 150 staff.
A frontline read on the AI startup scene: even as remote tooling matures, incubators and big labs still bet on physical proximity for trust and networks.
AI makes it possible to build a company from anywhere, but founders are still choosing to sit together, Station F director Roxanne Varza and Anthropic’s Aiden Blake said. They spoke on a panel at Wave by Vento in Turin on Thursday.
“What’s really interesting is we’re seeing more and more people coming since the ‘AI boom’. I think actually a lot of teams are really embracing physical presence,” Varza said.
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