Since 2023 every French business has been recorded in the INPI-run Registre National des Entreprises, on top of INSEE's open SIRENE base — together covering well over 4 million legal units, most of them micro-entrepreneurs. This page is a live view of the public sources AtlasForgeX reads for France and the buying signals it detects.
Industries. Services, agri-food, manufacturing and a strong luxury/retail sector lead, with dense small-business activity across every region.
Regions. Île-de-France (Paris) dominates, with major hubs in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (Lyon), PACA (Marseille/Nice) and Nouvelle-Aquitaine (Bordeaux).
The legal source of truth for France is SIRENE / Infogreffe. It records every legally trading company — identifier, status, address and often officers and filings — which is why it is the most complete and current starting point for prospecting. See the full register directory.
Stored databases such as Apollo and ZoomInfo are built from three sources — shared user contacts, bought lists and web scraping — each tilted toward companies with a visible, English-language web presence. A family injection-moulding firm near Lyon is fully in SIRENE and Infogreffe and on its own site, yet rarely in a US-built, English-language warehouse.
| Segment | Share of firms | Online-footprint coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Large + mid | ~1% | Good — usually covered |
| Small (10–49) | ~4% | Variable — partial |
| Micro + auto-entrepreneurs | ~95% | Weak — under-represented |
French companies — overwhelmingly micro-firms and auto-entrepreneurs — are likely under-represented or absent from online-footprint databases. A structure-based estimate, not a figure measured from any database.
France overhauled its company records in January 2023, folding the old patchwork of commercial (RCS), trades and agricultural registers into a single Registre National des Entreprises (RNE) maintained by the INPI. Alongside it sits INSEE's SIRENE repository, the statistical backbone that issues the 9-digit SIREN identifying each legal unit and the 14-digit SIRET for each establishment; both are published as free, daily-updated open data. The active base now exceeds 14 million SIREN units, but that figure is inflated by the auto-entrepreneur regime — roughly 700,000 new micro-entrepreneurs register in a single year — so the count of substantive trading firms is far smaller.
This long tail is exactly where international aggregators stumble. Apollo and ZoomInfo skew toward companies with an English-language web presence, while a Lyon machine-shop, a Bordeaux vineyard or a Paris consultancy run their sites in French and may never join a contributory contact network. AtlasForgeX pulls from RNE, SIRENE and the French open web directly, surfacing recently registered and French-only firms the warehouses overlook.
This section streams from AtlasForgeX's own data collection — verified data sources, ingestion volume and detected buying-state signals for France, updated automatically. Company-level activity (new registrations, GOLDMINE candidates, signal and industry distribution) appears as the dataset grows.
AtlasForgeX tracks 54 public buying signals and collects across registries, the open web, hiring and news to surface French companies entering a buying window. How AtlasForgeX finds hidden companies →
Counts & structure: INSEE (Structural Business Statistics, SIRENE) and Annuaire des Entreprises / Infogreffe. Figures rounded; they vary by year and definition.
Coverage estimate: AtlasForgeX's analysis of the publicly described stored-database collection model against France's enterprise size distribution. The headline figure is a structure-based estimate, not measured from any database.
This research is a window into what AtlasForgeX sees every day. The product turns it into your pipeline — surfacing the companies entering a buying window, with verified contacts, the moment they move. Free trial, no card.
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