The €300k Investor Route Reality Check 2026: Why Direct Investment Requirements Exclude Most SaaS Founders and What 'Financial Products' Don't Count

Published 2026-10-08

SaaS founders keep confusing "investing money" with "qualifying for a visa," and conflating two different Talent routes that assess completely different things.

An SAS can legally form with €1 of share capital. So when a founder wires €30,000, €100,000, or more into the company account assuming the size of the transfer is what convinces French authorities to grant a visa, they have usually misunderstood which route they are on, and what it actually assesses.

The core confusion: investment size is not a universal Talent-visa test

Nounda advises on two Talent routes, and they are assessed on entirely different criteria: the French Tech Visa (Talent, Innovative Project) and the €30k entrepreneur route (Talent, Business Creation). Neither one turns on how large a number appears in a bank statement, which is precisely where most of the confusion starts.

A quick editorial flag, because it matters before you read further: a "€300,000 investor route" with fixed asset thresholds, job-creation or job-safeguarding tests, and an exclusion for "exclusively financial investments" does not appear anywhere in Nounda's verified knowledge of the two Talent routes. If you have read about that figure or that test online, you are either looking at outdated material, a different visa category entirely, or a source that has conflated "Passeport Talent," the deprecated pre-2024 name for the whole permit category, with a specific investor track that does not exist in the current framework Nounda works with. Verify any such claim directly with DRIEETS or immigration counsel before you act on it, and do not let it change how you plan your own filing.

What follows is what actually gates each of the two real routes, because that is the part founders get wrong in practice, not in theory.

The French Tech Visa: money is not the gate, novelty is

The French Tech Visa carries no minimum investment requirement. The gate is DRIEETS (French Ministry of the Economy), which assesses whether the project is genuinely new and differentiated for the French market, and that assessment has nothing to do with how much capital sits in the company account.

Qualifying innovation can be technical: a proprietary architecture, a novel algorithm, or a defensible data pipeline. It can also be non-technical, which surprises a lot of founders, since a genuinely new usage, a business model nobody else runs, or a clear social or environmental innovation all qualify equally. What fails is a thin AI wrapper around a public LLM API, or an existing approach applied to a new geography with nothing else changed, because DRIEETS is judging differentiation, not effort.

The requirement that actually trips founders up is the dossier itself: a minimum of 2 support letters (lettres de soutien), mandatory, from employees of companies in the La French Tech ecosystem, verified against the public list at france.dealroom.co/companies. No thematic match between the signer's company and your product is required, the signer does not need to be French, and they do not need to be C-level. Founders spend weeks agonising over a capital figure when the real bottleneck is sourcing two legitimate, independent signers.

The €30k entrepreneur route: investment, not share capital, and not the whole test

The €30,000 required for the entrepreneur route is evidenced by an attestation de dépôt des fonds, issued by the lawyer holding the funds, and submitted to DRIEETS. That is a distinct document from an attestation de dépôt de capital, which is a bank's proof of share-capital deposit at incorporation, and Nounda does not use that document for this route because an SAS can legally form with €1 of share capital regardless of what the founder later invests.

The €30k alone does not qualify anyone. The route also requires a Master's degree or 5 years of professional experience, and diplomas usually need an apostille or a sworn French translation before DRIEETS will accept them. On top of that, the dossier needs a business plan with multi-year financial projections, typically a 3-year view, showing the business is viable, not just funded.

This is where the "money in the bank isn't enough" problem actually lives for real founders. A founder wires €30,000, gets the lawyer's attestation, and assumes the transfer itself is the dossier, when DRIEETS is weighing the business plan and the founder's qualifications right alongside the fund evidence, which means an unfunded plan or an unverified diploma can sink an otherwise well-capitalised application.

Before you decide which route to build a dossier around, it helps to have someone map both against your actual project rather than your instinct about which one sounds more serious. That is the free part of the process, and it is worth doing before any legal or lawyer fees are spent.

Why SaaS founders specifically get this wrong

SaaS founders default to the €30k entrepreneur route more often than their product justifies, because writing a check feels like a concrete, controllable step, whereas submitting a project for DRIEETS to judge on novelty feels exposed. That instinct is understandable, but it frequently steers a genuinely innovative founder onto the harder, costlier route when the French Tech Visa would have required no investment at all.

A pattern we see with founders on this route: a SaaS founder over-engineers a capital injection or structures an intercompany transfer specifically to "prove seriousness" to French authorities, when DRIEETS on the innovative route is not weighing seriousness in euros at all. What it wants is a plain answer to two questions: what is genuinely new about the product, and why can't a competent team replicate it with publicly available tools. A well-written differentiation statement answers that. A larger wire transfer does not.

The two routes run on different logic entirely, and it is worth holding that distinction in one place. The French Tech Visa assesses the idea. The €30k entrepreneur route assesses the investment, the founder's credentials, and the business plan, together. Choose based on which test you can actually pass, not based on which route sounds more serious on paper.

What doesn't satisfy either route

A few misconceptions show up often enough to name directly.

• ❌ Micro-entrepreneur (auto-entrepreneur) status is a business staging choice, not a visa route. It does not satisfy the innovative-project dossier or the business-creation dossier under any circumstances.
• ❌ Share capital deposited at incorporation, even well above €1, is not the same evidence as the €30k route's investment attestation. Conflating a bank's capital-deposit certificate with the lawyer's attestation de dépôt des fonds is a documentation error, and it is one we see often.
• ❌ A large bank balance or an impressive number on a pitch deck does not substitute for the actual dossier work, whichever route you are on: support letters sourced and verified on the French Tech Visa, apostilled diplomas and multi-year projections on the entrepreneur route.

The mistake we see again and again is treating the money as the proof, when the money is only ever one input into a dossier that authorities are reading in full.

The process both routes share, regardless of investment size

Both routes run through the same two stages. First, the long-stay D visa is filed at the French consulate in the founder's country of residence, where the project dossier, whether that's support letters and the DRIEETS innovation assessment or the investment evidence for the entrepreneur route, gets reviewed. Second, once the founder lands in France, the visa is validated and the carte de séjour is obtained via OFII and the prefecture. Neither route skips either stage.

Plan for 3 to 6 months end-to-end, case-by-case. Nobody legitimately processes this in weeks, and any source promising a faster fixed timeline is worth treating with suspicion.

⚠️ Algerian nationals are excluded from the French Tech Visa under the 1968 France-Algeria agreement, and must use the €30k entrepreneur route instead, which for this nationality involves more complex legal engineering than the standard filing.

One more nuance worth knowing if you are already in France on a student visa: switching from student to founder status is a change of status to the same Talent requirements described above, not a separate or easier path. It is done from France via the prefecture rather than a consulate abroad, and the timing has to respect the window while the student status is still valid.

How to actually choose your route

If your product is genuinely differentiated and you can document that, technically or non-technically, the French Tech Visa clears the bar with no investment requirement at all. That is the more efficient route for most SaaS founders building something novel.

If instead you hold a Master's degree or 5 years of experience, have €30,000 to invest, and are running something less novel, an agency, an SME, a services business with a solid multi-year plan, the entrepreneur route fits better and plays to what you can actually prove.

DRIEETS's own guidance backs this up: if the project is not genuinely novel, switch to the €30k entrepreneur route early rather than forcing a weak innovation claim, because a DRIEETS rejection costs months, not weeks. A pattern we see with founders who pick the €30k route by default is that it feels more concrete, more within their control, when their actual product would have cleared the French Tech Visa's bar with no investment at all. Figure out which test you can pass before you commit to either dossier.

Nounda helps founders figure out, before any money moves, which of the two real Talent routes fits their project: the French Tech Visa for genuinely differentiated products, or the €30k entrepreneur route for founders with capital, credentials, and a business plan to back it. That means route design first, then the full dossier build, support letters sourced and verified against the Dealroom-listed French Tech ecosystem, or the business plan, diploma apostilles, and the lawyer's attestation de dépôt des fonds for the entrepreneur route, then company formation, the visa filing itself, and first-90-days support once you land. Because Nounda stays through company formation and the first 90 days rather than handing off after the visa is filed, founders do not end up holding a KBIS and a residence card with no idea how to open a bank account or run payroll. Full route and pricing details are at nounda.com/pricing.