4 million SIREN, 200 000 structured PMEs — and Apollo barely names a slice of them
France is the second-largest B2B economy in the European Union, but the shape of that economy hides from US-built prospecting stacks. The strategically interesting tier — the 200 000-or-so structured PMEs (10–250 employees) and the 6 200 ETI (250–4 999 employees) — almost never lives where Apollo, ZoomInfo and Cognism look.
They live in the RCS via Infogreffe, in the RNE launched in 2023 under INPI custody, in the bilans filed at the greffe, in their NAF/APE classification at INSEE, and on French-language websites whose mentions légales are mandatory under article 6-III of the LCEN. AtlasForgeX reads those sources directly.
What an English-built data stack does not see
Apollo, ZoomInfo and Cognism share an architecture that worked for the SaaS-aware coastal-US market: aggregate LinkedIn profiles, enrich with bought email lists, ship as a fast UI. The French mid-market is a different physical object. A 90-person SAS supplying Tier-2 components into the Toulouse aerospace cluster, or a fourth-generation agroalimentaire SARL in Bretagne, simply does not produce the LinkedIn signal those tools depend on.
What they do produce: an Infogreffe record of the dirigeant with their year of birth, a yearly bilan filed at the local greffe with headcount and balance-sheet total, an APE code from INSEE that pins the industry to four digits, and a French-language website with mentions légales that contain a direct phone line and a function mailbox. Those are the four anchors of serious French B2B prospecting and they sit outside the LinkedIn graph.
The four sources AtlasForgeX queries for France
Direct read of the Registre du Commerce et des Sociétés via the Infogreffe platform. AtlasForgeX extracts the SIREN, the legal form (SAS, SARL, SA, EURL, SASU), the registered address, the dirigeant (with birth year), the share capital and the activity description. RCS is updated same-day on registration events at the greffe.
The Registre National des Entreprises launched 1 January 2023 absorbed the legacy Répertoire des Métiers, the Registre de l'Agriculture and parts of the RCS into a single INPI-custodied file. AtlasForgeX queries the RNE in parallel with Infogreffe so a NAF-code search returns commercial companies and artisans, agricultural entities and self-employed structures — the population an RCS-only query systematically misses.
Annual comptes annuels deposited at the commercial-court greffe. From the bilan AtlasForgeX derives the balance-sheet total (turnover-band proxy), the headcount where disclosed, the audit status, and the year-on-year trend. Combinable with APE 30.30Z + balance sheet 5–20 M€ + Occitanie to surface only the aerospace suppliers of a specific size in the Toulouse basin.
Live analysis of the company domain targeting the mentions légales (mandatory under article 6-III of the LCEN 2004), the recrutement page, direct phone lines, and function mailboxes. In parallel: signals from APEC, Indeed.fr, HelloWork and France Travail — active recruiting being the strongest single buying signal for an expanding PME. Analysis language: French only.
RGPD & CNIL: the legal anatomy of a French B2B campaign
// What article 6.1.f RGPD actually permits in France
- The lawful basis for B2B outreach in France is Article 6.1.f RGPD (legitimate interest), read together with the Loi Informatique et Libertés as modified in 2018 to align with the GDPR.
- The CNIL's published guidance on BtoB prospection explicitly accepts direct outreach to a person at their professional address when (a) the message relates to their professional function and (b) an opt-out mechanism is available in the first contact.
- Role mailboxes (
contact@,commercial@,achats@) are not personal data under Article 4 RGPD and therefore sit outside the RGPD scope entirely; they fall under the Code de la consommation if the recipient is a consumer, which by construction they are not. - Named professional addresses (
prenom.nom@firme.fr) are personal data, but processable on legitimate-interest grounds under the CNIL's BtoB position, provided the outreach is function-relevant and the unsubscribe is honoured. - AtlasForgeX processes every record locally on the Windows endpoint. No personal data leaves the user's machine for a third country — the Schrems II question is structurally outside scope.
Where the structured PMEs actually cluster
French industrial geography is unusually concentrated by sector. AtlasForgeX surfaces the underlying APE codes by region without forcing the user to remember the four-digit codes:
// Aerospace · Occitanie
Toulouse-Blagnac Tier-1 to Tier-3 suppliers around Airbus, ATR, Daher and the space ecosystem. APE 30.30Z, 33.16Z and adjacent metalwork codes.
// Automotive · Hauts-de-France
Stellantis-adjacent supplier base, plus the Toyota Valenciennes ecosystem. APE 29.32Z, 22.19Z, 25.50A. Sub-tier PMEs that never appear in transatlantic CRMs.
// Tech · Île-de-France
SaaS and IT services concentrated around La Défense, Paris and the southern arc to Massy. APE 62.01Z, 62.02A, 63.11Z. Dirigeants often LinkedIn-active here; SDRs still miss the founder layer.
// Agroalimentaire · Bretagne
Family-held food processors, cooperatives and aquaculture operators. APE 10.11Z, 10.71A, 10.85Z. Almost zero LinkedIn footprint, dense French-language web presence.