PARIS — The coffee machine spits out doses of espresso. Young men in shorts and loafers line up on a leatherette sofa, balancing Macs or iPads on their knees, discussing bands or business plans. Some speak French, others English. The lighting is subtle, the ideas sound bright.

In a start-up incubator tucked away in an upper floor of an office building in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, several dozen entrepreneurs dream of building the next Google, Facebook or Zynga. It might look like Silicon Valley, but one thing is missing: the money.

In the United States, promising Internet start-ups can expect venture capitalists to come calling at an early stage. Fat checks often follow quickly. In Europe, many entrepreneurs have to wait longer; to get their businesses up and running, they sometimes have to rely on unorthodox sources of funding, including France’s generous welfare benefits.

“The most important business angel in France is probably the unemployment office,” said Stéphane Allard, founder of a social media marketing company called Wise Metrics, his tongue only partly in cheek.