By train and motorbike to Paris, CivAI visiting partner Scaleway

On Friday 18 September 2026, Aran Arunakiri and Pascal Mariany travelled to Paris on behalf of CivAI. Aran by train, Pascal by motorbike. The destination was the headquarters of Scaleway on Rue Roquépine, the European cloud provider on which CivAI runs its production and with whom we have been collaborating since the beginning of this year in the Scaleway Startup Program.

A warm welcome at La Maison

We were welcomed by Martin Gramling, our regular contact at Scaleway, and his colleagues Georges Abi-Aad, Franck Pagny, Germain Kerandel, Anwar Antif and Frédéric Bardolle. After lunch in the company canteen, we had a working session in a meeting room that quite literally hangs in the clouds. Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway, also took the time to meet us. That says something about how seriously Scaleway takes its European startups.

They deliver, we build, we connect

That was the central theme of our presentation. Scaleway provides the sovereign European infrastructure and the open models, such as Qwen, GLM, Gemma and Mistral. CivAI builds the applications that people actually use, from EduGPT, GovGPT, OrgGPT and CareGPT to CivAI Coding Studio and our bespoke applications. And we bring the public sector on board: schools, colleges, municipalities and care organisations that want to keep their AI in Europe.

We showed where we are now and where we are heading. From the launch at the Delflanden partnership in October to the scaling up of our GPT products. That growth requires computing power, and the conversation quickly turned to that.

What we discussed

• Capacity. Starting a lesson in a school group means hundreds of pupils pressing enter at the same time. We put our measurements and expected growth on the table, so Scaleway knows what’s coming.
• Longer answers. Lesson blocks, meeting minutes and policy documents require long, coherent texts. Scaleway is increasing the limit on answer length, a request we had previously submitted.
• Testing together. CivAI offers to test new open models in real classrooms and town halls before they become widely available. Scaleway gets practical feedback, we get early access.
• Beyond the startup programme. We want to expand the collaboration into a true partnership, with CivAI as a showcase for the Scaleway stack in the public sector.

The big dream

Providing Europe with sovereign and valuable AI. Scaleway supplies the foundation, CivAI builds the application layer and brings the community. The conversation about this has begun, and that alone already felt like a step forward.

See you at ai-PULSE

The motorbike is back in Bennekom and the train brought Aran home safely. On 13 October we’ll be back in Paris, when CivAI will be in the Startup Village at ai-PULSE, Scaleway’s AI conference at Station F. Do come and visit our stand.

Especially in an age of AI, it’s good to know who provides your infrastructure and where it’s located. For us, the answer is simple. In Europe, with a partner who grows with us.

Photos CivAI, Scaleway Paris, 18 September 2026