To be successful, an ecosystem relies on three key pillars: talent, capital, and ambition. The last one is more difficult to quantify, but $B+ companies are an expression of the ambition of founders to build tech champions at local, regional and global levels as their companies scale in size and impact.

Since 2015, all three pillars have been transformed across many countries across the continent. Once rare, $B+ companies are now a feature of almost every European economy. In fact, 11 ecosystems that were yet to produce a $B+ success story by the end of 2015 now boast one or more.

While gains have been made across the board, the biggest leaps forward have taken place in the UK, Germany and France. These countries have gone from accumulating low double-digit or even single-digit funding levels in the decade leading up to 2014 to attracting a combined $250B over the past 10 years — the UK even nears the $150B mark. The tech headcount in these countries has also grown by 6-8 times (in line with the wider 7 times increase seen across Europe), with the total count of employees hired by UK-based tech companies approaching a notable 1M employees. Across European countries, an average of 72% of tech employees work in the same country as their company’s headquarters; the rest are based elsewhere in the region, contributing to the growth of other ecosystems through job creation and knowledge transfer.

The growth trajectory of these countries illustrates the power of the flywheel effect: Europe’s first $B+ companies came from the UK, Germany, France and Sweden, paving the way for more funding, talent and billion-dollar companies to thrive.

And with this change in mindset, we’re seeing more companies, more ambitious ideas, built to solve harder problems. Founders are upping their game.

Travelling back to 2015, there were just shy of 8,000 early stage companies. Fast forward to 2024, and that number has more than quadrupled to 35,000+. Growth-stage companies have seen an eightfold increase to over 3,400 and there are more $B+ valued companies in Europe than ever before. These numbers give us the best bird’s-eye view perspective of truly how much stronger Europe's entrepreneurial muscle has become in a decade. It’s exciting to think where the next decade might take us.

Over that time frame, Europe has generated world-class returns and a growing track record of exits. It has scaled valuable firms across sectors and the breadth of the continent.

In fact, Europe has witnessed billion-dollar companies emerge across 30 unique countries, reflecting the continent’s broad entrepreneurial reach. As these companies grow and advance along their funding journey, many will eventually reach the point of an IPO or acquisition. However, exits tend to lag behind both $B+ valuation milestones and especially company formation, so it's perhaps unsurprising that, to date, only 15 European countries have seen a billion-dollar exit. This trend underscores the time it can take for these high-value businesses to reach liquidity events, even as they continue to expand and scale.

This cluster of countries is centered on Western Europe, stretching as far east as Poland and as far south as Italy. But even among this cluster, exits aren’t evenly distributed. Almost half of all $B+ exits over the past decade took place in the UK alone, including the two biggest exits Europe has seen since 2015: IHS Markit’s $45B acquisition in 2020, and ARM’s blockbuster IPO in 2023, which closed its first day of trading with a market cap of $65B. 

Sweden comes next, having been host to Europe’s third-biggest exit when Spotify went public via a direct listing in 2018. Germany follows, with Berlin-based AUTO1 being the the seventh largest exit in Europe over the past decade, followed by Delivery Hero's 2017 IPO. Poland also follows, home to top 10 exited company Allegro.

Europe’s biggest success stories of the past decade? Spotify and Revolut.

That’s according to our survey respondents, who were asked to name the company they thought was emblematic of Europe’s growth over the past 10 years. This was an optional question and no prompts were provided — impressively, Spotify and Revolut were named by 26% and 15% of respondents, respectively. But what's more is that more than 110 unique companies were named by respondents more than once, and close to 30 mentioned over 10 times.

Describing these companies as European champions hardly captures their impact. Some of these globally recognised brands have inspired both founders and investors, and are part of the draw for many new joiners coming from outside of tech. Spotify has transformed the music streaming landscape and created a ripple effect in the wider market for digitally distributed audio content.

Finance companies — Revolut, Klarna and Adyen — grab the next top spots, underlining Europe's characterisation as a global centre of excellence for finance. Finally, the presence of Mistral, which was only founded in 2023, in a list of the most influential companies of the past decade highlights Europe's ambitions to create its own AI leaders.

We’ve organised the barriers to success under six keys to unlock the future European tech deserves. These span from unlocking capital at scale, to liquidity, to customers, to regulatory dynamism, global talent competitiveness and commercialising R&D.

None of these individually is insurmountable, but bold, positive action is needed. We must support those who are finding new ways to tackle old problems. An example is the ‘28th Regime’ or EU Inc, as it’s sensibly been rebranded, an EU legal framework that would allow businesses to operate in a single market. This would scale back bureaucracy and scale up ease of doing business across European borders.

Mindset is a key pillar of the success of our ecosystem, and more than any of the challenges identified in our survey, it is a risk to unlocking Europe's success. If we rise to the challenge, we can look forward to another transformative decade. A mantra for the team working on this report is that it's human nature to overestimate what's possible in the short term, but underestimate the long term.

In ten years' time, the talent pool will have become even stronger and will continue to attract new joiners at a similar rate to the last decade. This means an additional 15 million jobs created by Europe's technology companies.

Capital will be unlocked for scale - allowing Europe to keep its brightest minds here, focused on solving our society's and economy's toughest problems.

European tech will make a significant contribution to the continent's GDP by adding $5T worth of ecosystem value - growing at a compound annual growth rate of 10%, in line with more mature ecosystems such as the US. This would bring Europe's total ecosystem value to just over $8T. And by then, Europe will be home to its first trillion-dollar company.

If we can keep up the momentum and address the challenges we’ve set out, Europe will be a tech superpower that’s fit for a new generation. It will be highly dynamic and conscious of the impact it's having on the world and a home to the world's most ambitious companies.

A technology superpower for a new generation.