Creandum and Dealroom has released the report the The Ascendancy of European Tech: A data-backed report on Europe’s rise to the top. Among other things, it highlights how European venture capital went from nothing after the dot.com bust (<$1 billion per year in the early 2000’s) to something between $30-100 billion per year today (depending on what the new post-covid investment level will be).
I’m a strong believer that European technology companies will do better in the next 20 years (and be better investments), but I think it will be very tough to close the gaps with the US and China with regards to building very large companies ($10+ billion market cap) led from Europe.
Issues that will continue to be challenges are that the ecosystems in Europe are geographically distributed, home markets are small and regulation likely to be tougher than in the US. So for many European technology companies getting to real scale it will still make a lot of sense to move headquarters to the US for talent, market and capital reasons. So while there will be more European decacorns ($10+ billion in market cap), my guess is that there will be more American decacorns too.
