The Ascendancy of European Tech: A data-backed report on Europe’s rise to the top

2023 is a special year for Creandum as it marks our 20-year anniversary — two decades backing the companies of tomorrow across Europe. We took this milestone to reflect on the past and look at what’s ahead of us. In partnership with Dealroom, we created a report to take a closer look at the development of European Tech within the past 20 years.

The data shows that Europe’s wealth of experienced VC investors, the talent amongst its 600 million plus population, the flywheel effect of creating many globally successful tech companies, entrepreneurial role models such as Daniel Ek, Sebastian Siemiatowski, Daniel Dines and Nikolay Storonsky and the dominance across emerging sectors such as Climate Tech and AI mean Europe is ready for its best period yet. It’s an amazing development over the past 20 years as Europe’s tech scene, after the dotcom bust, was essentially “down and counting”.

Looking at the data report, the analysis reveals the following about Europe‘s potential for even greater growth in the future:

The ‘Flywheel’ of Entrepreneurship

• Europe’s total number of unicorns has grown 88% compared to the US’ 56% since 2014
• Europe has the highest number of unicorn tech hubs in the world — 514 across 65 cities in 25 countries
• More startups than ever are emerging from previous successes, with Spotify having the highest number of 2nd generation startups, followed by Klarna
• Europe’s share of global VC funding has quadrupled with Europe now taking more than a third of global investments at early-stage
• Of the $2.5T value created in European tech over the past decade, most of the value has come from recent cohorts, meaning Europe is even better positioned for growth in the future

Dominance and leadership across emerging sectors

• Europe already accounts for around a third of all global funding in key emerging sectors, including climate tech, digital health and quantum computing
• Europe has 40% more developers than the US
• Climate tech in Europe has remained a growth area despite the recent venture downturn, with 22% of total European funding going into climate tech in 2023 vs 7% for the US
• Half of the world’s top science clusters focused on emerging technology are in Europe

In just 20 years, Europe has gone from being an outsider to a global challenger. We’re confident that in the next 20 years, Europe can take the lead in emerging tech sectors, including digital health, climate tech, fintech and AI, that are critical to our economies and lives.

For the past 20 years, our overriding ambition at Creandum has been to back the best entrepreneurs and the great thing about Europe is that successful companies can come from anywhere. We have seen first-hand with companies like Spotify, which became a global category leader headquartered in Europe, how software has been a catalyst for disruption and as the ambitions of the next generation of founders get bigger, we expect to see even more great global tech companies created here.