By: Sifted
June 22, 2022
European policymakers are going to publish the most comprehensive plan so far for how to help European startups grow and compete globally. The stakes are high — Europe wants to produce its own deeptechs to compete with innovations coming from the US and China — and the EU realises that it will need home-grown solutions to pursue its ambitious digital and green agendas. But for now, Brussels is only halfway there. Early-stage investment in European startups is comparable to that in the US and the number of unicorns in Europe doubled in 2021. Yet Europe still has a “scaleup gap”, with significantly fewer growth-stage tech businesses than the US and China. It’s also behind on deeptech investment; the US and China combined provided about 81% of global private investment in the sector between 2015 and 2018. To accelerate the change, the European Commission is going to present a policy roadmap dubbed A New European Innovation Agenda, a draft of which has been seen by Sifted. The plan will focus on five pillars: