The unicorn becomes a herd animal – Europe’s start-up scene becomes an alternative to big tech

After that, Europe has a good chance of becoming the new shooting star in the AI ​​sky. We still have significantly fewer unicorns on the continent than the USA or China, but the curve is pointing upwards.

Five years ago there were no five companies that managed to break the symbolic valuation threshold of one billion euros, now there are 49. Some of these companies have become indispensable in the global market.

The Swedish Spotify is (despite or because of Joe Rogan) the world market leader in music streaming, the company Klarna, also Swedish, is a leader in installment payment services, the Dutch company ASML is the global leader in lithography systems for the semiconductor industry. We can build on this success: 115 billion dollars of capital flowed into European start-ups last year, significantly more than the 43 billion that were still there in 2020.

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Sequioa Capital, a Silicon Valley-based premier venture capital funder for tech startups, has breathed a sniff of morning air. According to a memo circulating in VC circles, Europe could soon turn from a spectator to an attacker when it comes to the start-up boom.

Europe has much of what everyone is currently looking for

The financiers are not only optimistic that the unicorn species in Europe is mutating from a solitary animal to a herd animal. The continent has a few resources that are badly needed. It’s not about money. Venture capitalists are currently chasing even the most shabby start-ups like little children chasing soap bubbles glittering in the sun. It’s time for more substance.

Europe has much of what everyone is currently looking for. On the one hand, there is knowledge capital: three of the five best computer science courses in the world are offered in Cambridge, Oxford and Zurich.

Second, human capital: With nearly six million developers available, Europe has a larger talent pool than the US.

And thirdly, the continent offers the diversity that other regions are now lacking. Since when have VC firms of all things been interested in the topic of diversity? Then when it promises economic success.

As early as 1973, the US sociologist and economist Mark Granovetter described what that could look like. In the analysis of successful networks, Granovetter did not focus on the strong but on the weak connections. It’s not necessarily the large overlaps and intense relationships in ecosystems that contribute to success. It is often precisely the connections that one threatens to ignore as insignificant. They essentially decide on the flow of information and innovative strength.

Miriam Meckel: We are looking for heroic start-ups with a real disruption

There could have been other regions of the US where the tech industry could have thrived, like around Boston on the east coast. But while large, vertically integrated companies there steadily pursued a strategy that had already been established and allowed new ideas to sink into a layer of clay, Silicon Valley seethed towards the boiling point with a growing number of small, agile start-ups. In the meantime, the little ones in the Valley have grown up and suffer from the same problems that also affect other sectors that are on course for saturation.

So the signs for Europe are good. Due to Europe’s impressive industrial tradition, start-ups in future-oriented technology fields such as AI, robotics and quantum computing in particular have excellent prerequisites for becoming globally successful. When they then dare more than the umpteenth copy of one and the same business model.

The search is therefore not on for the delivery heroes of what is already known, the exploiters of an economy of convenience, who are heading for the next bubble with exaggerated ratings. We are looking for the heroic start-ups of a real disruption. You could write history for the future today by combining innovative strength and sustainability and thus contributing almost organically to the diversification of the tech industry.

The best alternative to Big Tech from Silicon Valley is a thriving small tech scene in Europe. More European venture capital is needed for this. It’s going to be worth it.

In this column, Miriam Meckel writes fortnightly about ideas, innovations and interpretations that make progress and a better life possible. Because what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly. ada-magazin.com.

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