A French billionaire is turning this huge, abandoned railway building into the world’s biggest startup campus
Shona Ghosh/Station F
Station F’s restaurant hall.
When it comes to hobbies, some tech billionaires are off trying to buy land in New Zealand to prepare for Doomsday.
Not Xavier Niel, who is one of France’s richest men and worth £7 billion, according to Forbes.
Niel is spending his millions turning an old railway depot in Paris into what he claims is the world’s biggest startup campus.
It’s the first space of its kind in the city, housing up to 1,000 international startups under one roof.
The building is based in Paris’ 13th arrondissement, an area mostly known for warehouses and Chinese restaurants, local VCs told Business Insider.
Station F is still a building site, but the first startups are due to move in during the first week of July.
Here’s a look at the unfinished site:
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This is the Halle Freyssinet, an abandoned railway building from the 1920s.
It was built in 1927 by Eugene Freyssinet, a pioneering French civil engineer.
The Halle Freyssinet fell into disrepair, but telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel bought the building in 2013 for €70 million (£60 million).
Niel is the founder of Free mobile, France’s second biggest ISP. The CEO of French startups VizEats described Niel as France’s version of Richard Branson.
Niel has rebranded the Halle Freyssinet as Station F, and is turning it into what he claims is the world’s biggest startup campus. He is investing £217 million into the project. This is what it currently looks like…
…and this is how it will eventually look.
Roxane Varza is the director of Station F and is overseeing the project, picking out the companies that will run startup programmes from the building.
Varza used to run Microsoft’s startup programmes, Bizspark and Microsoft Ventures, in France. She’s also a former TechCrunch journalist.
Station F will house 1,000 startups, all of which will take part in company-backed accelerators, or its own Founders program. Facebook, Zendesk, and Vente-Privee will all run startup programs in Station F.
Station F is 34,000 square metres and is the same length as the Eiffel Tower lying sideways.
It contains three huge halls, intersected by public access routes that will allow pedestrians to cut through the massive building rather than walk around it.
Here’s a 3D render of how one of those halls will look.
The third hall is the most impressive so far, and will be a giant restaurant that will be open to the public. It already features train carriages and train tracks.
The restaurant will hold up to 1,000 diners, some of whom can eat inside the train carriages. The carriages date from 1976.
This is the full length of the restaurant hall.
There are some cool features elsewhere in the building, like these cube-shaped meeting rooms which stick out into space.
Station F will look like a warehouse even when it’s finished, but there will be some distinctive decorative touches.
The areas where startups will sit look like any other coworking space, just much, much bigger.
Station F was due to open in April, but this has been delayed to early July after a basement flood.
This is a 3D render of what the finished Station F will look like come July.
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