Europe’s Tech Scale-up Potential: Unlocking a €1 Trillion Investment Opportunity

The size of the European technology sector has grown almost 50x over the last two decades. Building on this achievement, there is the potential to generate up to an additional € 1 trillion of investment opportunity in Europe’s technology companies over the next five years.

Over the past several months, a group of independent experts have worked together to develop a set of findings, opportunities and recommendations that would serve to boost Europe’s competitiveness and sovereignty.

The resulting report is intended to be resource which provides data and input for the policy discussions concerning the next EU Multi-annual Financial Framework (MFF], the Capital Markets Union (CMU) as well as the upcoming report on the Competitiveness of Europe.

The report sets out recommendations for a range of institutions including the EC and national governments and their sovereign funds, pension funds, insurance companies and asset managers, corporations and corporate venturing arms, and obviously venture capital and growth equity funds and financial services firms.

The report’s key finding is that a significant scaling of the capital available for Europe’s technology companies is highly opportune. For pension plans, asset managers and corporates, this represents a €1 trillion investment opportunity which can be invested over the next five years, via specialised venture capital and growth equity funds, in Europe’s fast-growing technology companies. This would drive several benefits.

Strategically, this investment would preserve and enhance Europe’s sovereignty and security as funding would be available to back essential solutions in several fields including AI and computing, healthcare, biotechnology, energy transition, climate change, space and defence.

Financially, this would not adversely impact EU and national budgets. Instead, this would generate returns for European taxpayers, savers, and pension plan holders, helping fund our welfare systems and building a more sustainable economy and equitable society.

Tactically, this would catalyse several key national and European goals: boosting private investment into research and development, fostering the single market and the capital markets union while strengthening the competitiveness of our businesses.

Convener of the Group William Stevens commented: “While Europe and Belgium face many challenges, the pace of development of our technology ecosystems over the past decade is a success story that can be built upon. Our independent and specialised investment fund managers can effectively scale investment across Europe and across the technologies that are key for our future health, security and wellbeing. Over the next five years, an additional €1 trillion of funding can be invested at the European level to deliver the technology sector’s full potential. This capital investment would lead to better outcomes for our businesses, governments and societies by improving competitiveness, protecting sovereignty, and delivering attractive long-term financial returns.”

The report can be downloaded online https://scalinginvestments.eu/.

The independent experts involved are listed below and contributed strictly in a personal capacity, in alphabetical order:

• Timo Bartell
• Hugues Bultot
• Jan Dexel
• Janke Dittmer
• Stefano Firpo
• Rob Genieser
• Anne Glover
• Catherine Lewis La Torre
• James Mawson
• Massimo Portincaso
• Olivier Rousseaux
• Jean Schmitt
• Robert-Jan Smits
• Patrik Sobocki
• Philippe Tibi
• William Stevens [convener of the Group]
• Iva Tchetinova [support to the Group]

For further information, please
• Visit the website on www.scalinginvestments.eu
• Contact William Stevens at william@techtour.com or +32 495 273 541