Europe’s AI startups are losing ground to the US — and their own investors are to blame. Only 5% of global venture capital is raised in the EU, according to the European Commission. The US, by contrast, attracts more than half, while China takes 40%. Yet Europe isn’t capital-poor: households save €1.4tn a year, nearly twice as much as in America. Still, very little of that money finds its way into startups, despite a plethora of incentives like the UK’s EIS tax relief for business angels.
Even when funding is available, Europe’s venture capital firms are slow and cautious. Funds spend weeks on diligence and hesitate once valuations rise past $10-15mn. Regulation is often cited as a hindrance, and to some extent, it is. However, American funds backing European startups operate under the same regulatory frameworks, yet their capital keeps flowing freely.
The drag isn’t the law itself. It’s investors who interpret rules conservatively — instead of moving decisively.
Conservatism over conviction
European investors have historically avoided risks. Banks, insurers, and pension funds have long dominated the market, driven by capital preservation. In Germany, the Mittelstand mindset — a focus on steady, long-term business — has led family-owned industrial firms to aim for generational stability. While that conservatism has built resilience, it also sets the tone for the capital markets. This cautious approach helps explain why net investment in the country fell by 6.3% between 2019 and 2024.
The venture industry reached Europe later than the US, and when it did, the continent’s funds poured money into e-commerce, fintech, and food delivery. In the case of deeptech, the majority of European VCs simply lacked the expertise — and oftentimes courage — to invest in real breakthroughs. As a result, in the pre-AI era, the most valuable companies here were players like Revolut, Klarna, Delivery Hero, Spotify, Farfetch, Adyen, and N26. All extremely strong businesses, but all relatively straightforward, with product-market fit evident as early as the seed stage.
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AI requires heavy upfront costs, particularly in energy, and investors willing to accept uncertainty. Many European funds aren’t prepared for that. They may write a small cheque for an early-stage startup, but often step aside for the following rounds. Lacking the technical conviction to see how early research translates into future markets, they view AI as riskier than it actually is — and pull back.
A system built for slowness and caution
The other major handicap is speed. European venture deals often crawl at a bureaucrat’s pace. I’ve seen a fund take 40 days to complete diligence on a one-year-old B2B startup that barely had 20 transactions a month. For a founder, that’s frustrating — in Silicon Valley, the same round would have closed in under a week.
The slowness also has cultural roots. Offices often go dark in August — try finding something open in France or Italy — then again over the winter holidays, and on weekends. When you’re fighting to compete in a global market, those gaps matter.
The cost of inaction
Europe is locking itself out from growth stages and becoming a feeder market, full of promising ideas that turn into American companies.
Numbers back this. In Q2 2025, only $5.7bn went into European growth-stage startups across 75 deals. That’s about 10% of global late-stage venture funding — the smallest share at any stage. Mega-rounds ticked up slightly last year, but they’re still well below the highs of 2021.
Examples abound. Graphcore was once hailed as the UK’s AI-hardware hope and raised over $600 mn, but was acquired in 2024 by SoftBank for roughly the same amount — well below its prior $2bn valuation. In France, Navya, an autonomous shuttle pioneer, filed for receivership in 2023 after struggling to secure follow-on funding. And in Sweden, Uniti, a bold EV bet on urban mobility, went bankrupt when capital dried up.
What must change
To attain a different outcome, European VCs need to act less like private-equity gatekeepers and more like angel investors. Given the valuations of AI startups, the risk premium associated with these deals may be gone, but taking chances is more productive than sitting on dry powder.
Founders in AI want conviction, flexibility, and cheques that arrive in days instead of months. They want funds that understand that multiple small, bold bets will outperform one slow “perfect” deal that drags on forever.
Smaller and mid-sized funds have an advantage here. Free from institutional mandates, they can creatively structure deals — SAFEs, convertibles, secondaries, even hybrids of equity and debt. What matters is the willingness to be agile and seize promising opportunities.
Europe’s choice
Europe’s AI scene has the talent, the research base, and even the money — even if right now it’s misallocated. What it lacks is urgency. As long as its venture capital ecosystem clings to caution, the best AI startups will keep taking foreign cheques, and with them, the talent and leverage that come with scale.
The choice is simple. Either Europe’s investors learn to act at startup speed, or the continent will remain a lab for others to harvest. It can build the next generation of global companies, but only if its capital stack sheds the instinct to hesitate when it matters most.
The AI race isn’t waiting, and Europe shouldn’t either.
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