A Saturday in In February 2022, the phones of European venture capitalists began to light up when WhatsApp groups exchanged sarcastic comments about a piece that appeared in the weekend edition of the Financial times. The consternation was caused by an extract from The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruptionby journalist Sebastian Mallaby, who for many in Europe reflected the misinformed and sometimes condescending attitude of Silicon Valley-based investors towards the continent.
Mallaby reported a 2019 incident when Matt Miller, a partner at Sequoia Capital VC fund, which has approximately $85 billion in assets under management, sent a memo to other partners at their Menlo Park office, claiming that the European technology ecosystem was And last but not least worthy of their attention. Considering that $30 billion was invested in European tech companies that year, the idea of an American VC having to use his “intuition” (in Mallaby’s words) to discover that there were opportunities in Europe caused howls of ridicule from Dublin to Berlin.
“How lucky for us bumpkin Europeans that the Americans came to teach us all about technology and VC in the year of our Lord 2019. We had been trading shellfish until then…” tweeted Lisett Luik, an Estonian founder and investor.
WIRED first produced an annual guide to the European startup ecosystem in 2011. It is fair to say that Europe was at a much earlier stage of development compared to the US. There were relatively few seasoned entrepreneurs and capital was not as accessible to founders as it was in the Valley. Four years later, Atomico, a venture capital fund founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, published its first “State of European Technology” report, showing that about $10 billion had been raised by European tech companies that year. Things have changed since then. In 2021, that number was $100 billion. Across the continent, an additional 98 companies were valued at more than $1 billion and the total value of the European ecosystem is estimated to have grown from $1 trillion in 2018 to $3 trillion in 2021.
Over the past few months, we’ve been looking for a new cohort of companies in 10 European cities (for the purposes of our report, counting Tel Aviv as Europe) that spark excitement among local entrepreneurs and investors. We strive to find ambitious founders at a relatively early stage who have a vision to build purpose-driven companies that respond to a need or meet a challenge. We do not claim that the list is exhaustive, or that the startups are the best known or most funded. But we hope it’s a snapshot of the businesses in each city that are exciting and inspiring to others in the ecosystem. And, who knows, maybe even Silicon Valley’s attention.
