The QA Company Joins the Scale Up Excellence 2026 Cohort

The QA Company, publisher of the QAnswer AI platform, has been selected for the Scale Up Excellence 2026 programme — a distinction awarded by French Tech to France's most internationally active scaleups.

Scale Up Excellence: Recognising France's Most International Scaleups

Scale Up Excellence is a French government programme designed to accelerate the international development of French technology scaleups. To be eligible, companies must generate between €1 million and €30 million in annual revenues, derive more than 50% of those revenues from outside France, and sustain annual growth above 20%. Selected companies receive tailored support: strategic mentoring, international expansion assistance, and facilitated access to financing.

In 2026, 116 scaleups were selected across France. The QA Company is one of six companies from the Saint-Étienne metropolitan area to join this cohort — a strong signal for the region's growing technology ecosystem.

A Recognition of The QA Company's International Trajectory

Since its founding, The QA Company has positioned itself at the intersection of AI performance and data sovereignty. Its platform, QAnswer, enables organisations to deploy powerful AI assistants — chatbots, document search tools, and agentic workflows — entirely within their own infrastructure, without sending sensitive data to third-party cloud providers.

QAnswer is trusted by some of the world's most demanding institutions: the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Smithsonian Institution, and Rockwell Automation. The platform holds both ISO 27001 (information security management) and ISO 42001 (AI management systems) certifications, making it one of the few European AI platforms to meet both standards simultaneously.

"Joining the Scale Up Excellence 2026 cohort is a tremendous recognition of the work accomplished by the entire team. We are proud to represent Saint-Étienne on the international stage and to contribute to the emergence of a sovereign, trustworthy European AI."

— Dennis Diefenbach, CEO, The QA Company

A Sovereign AI Platform Built for Enterprise and Public Institutions

QAnswer is built around three core principles: security, sovereignty, and simplicity. Organisations connect QAnswer to their existing knowledge sources — SharePoint, Confluence, databases, documents — and deploy a fully functional AI assistant without writing a single line of code. All processing runs on-premise or in a private cloud, ensuring that data never leaves the organisation's control.

The Scale Up Excellence distinction is both a validation of The QA Company's trajectory and an acceleration signal. With this recognition from French Tech, the company reinforces its commitment to building AI infrastructure that European enterprises and public institutions can trust.

About The QA Company

The QA Company is a European AI company headquartered in Saint-Étienne, France. It develops QAnswer, a sovereign AI platform that enables enterprises and public institutions to deploy secure, privacy-first AI assistants grounded in their own knowledge bases. QAnswer is ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certified and deployed with clients including the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Smithsonian Institution, and Rockwell Automation. Learn more at qanswer.ai.

Press Contact

Amandine Cami — The QA Company
amandine.cami@the-qa-company.com