KUZOG is granted Jeune Entreprise Innovante status

KUZOG has been granted Jeune Entreprise Innovante status. The status is a French statutory regime for small companies that spend a defined share of their costs on research and development.

The wording invites a misreading, so it is worth being exact. JEI is not a prize, a label, or a jury decision. It is a threshold in the tax code, and a company either clears it or it does not.

The test is arithmetic

The regime was created by the 2004 finance act and sits in the code général des impôts. To qualify for a given financial year, a company must satisfy every condition at once — no weighting, no overall impression, no compensating strength:

• It must be an SME: fewer than 250 employees, and either turnover under €50 million or a balance sheet total under €43 million.
• It must be under eight years old, for companies created from 1 January 2023 onwards.
• At least half its capital must be held by natural persons, other qualifying JEIs, public research or education bodies, scientific foundations, or qualifying investment vehicles.
• Its activity must be genuinely new — not the restructuring, extension, or takeover of an existing business.
• Research and development must account for at least a fixed percentage of its fiscally deductible charges.

That last condition is the one that does the work. The threshold was 15% of deductible charges, and was raised to 20% for financial years opened from 1 March 2025.

One fifth of everything a company spends has to be traceable to research — not to product development in the loose sense, and not to the word "innovation" in a deck, but to expenditure meeting the R&D definitions the state applies to the research tax credit, itemised, with identifiable people and work behind each line.

Why an audit is better evidence than an award

Awards test how well a company presents itself. This tests where its money went. A company that markets science but does not fund it fails the ratio, however good the story is, because the denominator includes sales, marketing and general costs.

For KUZOG, this means the same claims made elsewhere on this site now sit behind a state-verified spending profile: meristem-culture sanitation and in-vitro protocol development at Microplantes, and at Hydrobio the mineral matrix, the mycorrhizal consortium, and the HydrobioFormul machine-learning formulation engine — the work covered by our USPTO patent filing, which is filed and not yet granted.

Which ministry, and what the logo means

KUZOG holds the status by approval, not by assertion. Eligibility can be declared by a company and then secured through a rescrit — a formal request for a binding administrative opinion — and ours was approved by the tax administration, under the Ministère de l'Économie et des Finances. Whether the work counts as research is assessed separately, by the services of the ministry responsible for research through its regional research and innovation delegations.

Two departments therefore sit behind the status: the finance ministry, which approved ours, and the research ministry, which owns the R&D criterion and whose mark we display. Neither handed out a distinction. Between them they verified a spending profile.

What the status gives, and what it enables next

JEI relieves employer social contributions on staff working mainly on research, within annual caps, and local authorities may add a seven-year exemption from business property taxes. A corporate income tax exemption also exists, but only for companies created before the end of 2023.

In practice the relief lands on payroll, which is where an R&D-heavy company spends most of its money. It extends the runway of the scientific teams rather than the commercial ones. That is the point of the scheme, and it is the use we intend: field validation of the Hydrobio amendment, the EU 2019/1009 homologation file, and protocol development to widen the Microplantes catalogue.