Face Up named a winner of Bpifrance's Money Time competition

Face Up named a winner of Bpifrance's Money Time competition

Face Up has been selected as a winner of Money Time, the competition run by Bpifrance, the French public investment bank. The acceleration programme identifies the most promising French startups in their sector each year. For us, it is a strong endorsement of our mission: making people genuinely practise customer-facing skills through realistic AI role-play.

What is Money Time?

Money Time is Bpifrance's flagship programme for startups in their growth phase. A jury of investors, executives and sector experts selects the companies that combine genuine innovation, a solid business model and the ability to scale. Winners gain media exposure, strategic support and privileged access to the Bpifrance ecosystem.

For Face Up, the selection validates something we see repeatedly with our clients: conventional interpersonal-skills training lacks practice. Quizzes and videos are not enough to build customer-facing reflexes. People need to practise, get concrete feedback, and go again.

What we presented to the jury

We showed the jury how Face Up turns interpersonal-skills training into three concrete steps:

• Turn existing content into authentic scenarios: starting from case studies, scripts or competency frameworks, trainers build role-plays against AI avatars with configurable personalities: emotions, objections, speech pace.
• Deploy at scale, without VR: Face Up connects to any LMS that supports LTI 1.3, such as Moodle or Rise Up, and runs in the browser. No headsets, no logistical overhead.
• Steer learning with business metrics: every session ends with an actionable debrief: objectives met or not, strengths, areas to improve, an action plan and a time-stamped analysis of non-verbal cues. L&D leads track individual and group progress.

What convinced the jury was Face Up's ability to address a large market need (practical, on-the-job training for customer-facing teams) with a solution that keeps the trainer at the centre of the process, not the AI.

The B SMART interview

Following the selection, Mame-Mor Fall (CEO) and Jasper Desmet (CTO) were invited onto business news channel B SMART to introduce Face Up and explain how AI-driven conversational learning is changing the picture for training providers and L&D departments.

What it changes from here

The recognition from Bpifrance is part of a wider momentum. Face Up already works with organisations such as Cegos, Getlink, Liebherr and SKEMA Business School. Our clients use it to make their teams practise far more often than classroom role-play allows.

Money Time gives us additional visibility with training providers and L&D teams looking to modernise their programmes without starting from scratch. Our promise is unchanged: turn existing training content into measurable practice.

Our thanks to Bpifrance, to the jury, and to the partners and clients who test, challenge and build alongside us every day.

Want to see more?
Book a demo: contact@face-up.fr