It’s no secret that one of Europe’s strengths on the global stage is its manufacturing sector. The continent’s industrialists continue to churn out world-beating cars, chemicals, aircraft—and now, robots!

The march towards automated factories goes on. But, Europe’s industrial leaders said in a recent joint letter (detailed below), only if the EU doesn’t hold them back with overlapping laws. Policymakers agreed this month to exempt parts of the AI Act—a good start.

This month we spoke with Tom Wehmeier of Atomico, which publishes annual State of European Tech reports, about the trends he’s observed in the innovation ecosystem, what’s holding startups back, and how to bridge the gap between what founders need and what policymakers in the EU are doing.

🏗️ Making Progress

🇩🇪🇨🇭🇫🇷🇬🇧 European robots on the move. Stuttgart-based startup Sereact raised €95 million to expand its robotics software business, introducing a new AI model and expanding to the US. Swiss Hexagon Robotics announced plans to deploy 1,000 robots on factory floors over the next 7 years. Meanwhile, Paris-based SquareMind raised €15 million to grow its full-body robotic scanning tool, and London’s All3 raised €25 million to bring its robotic construction platform to market.

🇪🇸 Striking a chord. Amadeus, a travel tech company, bought France-based IDEMIA Public Security (IPS) for €1.2 billion. The acquisition will allow Amadeus to offer a full biometric solution that covers customers’ entire journey, from booking to boarding and into government border management systems.

🇧🇪 Energie Ommekeer. The Belgian government is buying back all of Engie’s dormant nuclear power plants, putting them back to work to boost the country’s energy resilience.

🇩🇪 Leading the post-LLM world. German software giant SAP scooped up minnow compatriot Prior Labs, just 15 months after it was founded, agreeing to invest €1 billion in the next 4 years. Prior Labs’ AI model is built to use enterprise data from spreadsheets and databases (which LLMs don’t handle well). The acquisition provides a healthy exit for many European VCs.

🇱🇹 A helping second hand. Lithuania’s Vinted reached an €8 billion valuation thanks to an oversubscribed secondary share transaction of €880 million. In 2025, Vinted generated €1.1bn in annual revenue and €62 million in net profits, in 26 markets.

🇫🇮 Looking up. Finnish AI‑cloud provider Verda has raised €100 million to scale its European‑based AI‑hyperscaler infrastructure, hire over 100 people, and expand into new markets across Europe, the US, and Asia.

🇪🇺 Energy sovereignty. The European Investment Bank Group confirmed they will finance €2.4 billion for energy resilience and cutting-edge innovation, responding to geopolitical pressure, energy insecurity, and the EU’s need to compete in strategic tech.

⛽ Policy Pitstop

• Tussle over the AI Act ends in compromise. Policymakers finalised negotiations to ease the impact of the AI Act on companies. Leaders agreed, with the help of some nudging from Germany, to exclude machinery (which is governed by sectoral laws). However, other sectors covered by their own liability laws, were not excluded.

• EU Inc Parliamentarian announced: The European Parliament will kick off the EU Inc negotiations, and MEP René Repasi (who wrote a preemptive report – that could have been more ambitious! – last year) confirmed he will take the helm. Negotiations are due to conclude in 2026. You can let Repasi know that we need him to be more ambitious, by contacting his office here.

• Wake-up call. A group of leading European industrialists from Airbus, ASML, Ericsson, Mistral AI, Nokia, SAP, and Siemens, called on the EU to urgently unify its markets, reduce overregulation, and invest strategically in AI and deep tech.

• Competitiveness, actually. The Polish government published a non-paper urging the EU to reconsider its upcoming Digital Fitness Act, for the sake of competitiveness.

• Scramble for AI. Hearing the buzz around Anthropic’s Mythos release, the EU’s AI Office wanted access, but will have to wait until August. European politicians are concerned that falling behind in access means missing cybersecurity vulnerabilities. OpenAI has since promised to hand over the keys to GPT-5.5-Cyber.

🌉 The Bridge

Tom Wehmeier is a Partner and Head of Intelligence at Atomico, a European venture capital firm. Atomico produces annual State of European Tech reports providing a comprehensive review of the ecosystem and the latest thinking of those who shape it.

Q1: There have now been 11 years of State of European Tech reports. What has changed in this time? Are there any trends you’ve seen?

Eleven years ago, a billion-dollar European tech company was exceptional. Today, we’re tracking a path toward trillion-dollar outcomes. That shift in the ceiling is reflected throughout the ecosystem — in the scale of entrepreneurial ambition, the calibre of talent willing to commit, the conviction of capital behind it.

The talent base has gone from hundreds of thousands to millions of people working in European tech, and it’s no longer a story about a handful of hubs but a genuinely pan-European phenomenon, with breakout success stories emerging from more than 100 cities and 30 countries. The volume matters, but the more important trend is what’s happening within the networks that have been built. Founders, operators, and investors are increasingly experienced, increasingly connected, and learning from each other faster than ever — and that compounds into the velocity, quality, and impact of decisions being made every day.

The flywheel is real: success breeds experience, experience breeds better companies, better companies breed bigger outcomes. Eleven years ago, we were reporting on Europe’s potential. Now we’re documenting compounding.

Q2: There’s a feeling in Europe that we have the talent, but our companies cannot scale. In your view, what are the biggest barriers preventing startups from becoming unicorns?

I’d start with the friction we still see in the system. Nearly 70% of founders say the regulatory environment is too restrictive. Europe must make it easier and faster to build, grow and sell across borders, at scale. One rulebook, one market, one standard. The upcoming EU-INC proposal is one important step in this direction, but the true prize remains delivering a true single market.

Then, capital. Europe is producing more global category leaders than ever, but too many face a structural funding gap at home. Late-stage rounds are smaller, scarcer and slower. Our strongest companies cannot have their ambitions capped by shallow capital pools. We need deep, liquid, full-stack markets from first cheque to IPO and beyond.

On talent, as mentioned above, the base is deep and expanding faster than the US, but the system still slows people down, and makes it harder to attract, reward and retain the world’s best talent. It remains harder to hire in, slower to relocate to, and more complex to move across than competing regions. Stock options, visas, taxation, and employment reform are all part of the picture here.

And finally, risk culture. Too often, risk is managed away rather than rewarded. Only 20% of European corporations actively engage with startups, versus 50% in the US. We need to treat risk culture as foundational infrastructure, as essential to our future as energy or capital.

Q3: What are the biggest gaps or misunderstandings between Brussels policymakers and Europe’s tech entrepreneurs? How can we help bridge them?

Fortunately, I see this gap as narrower than it’s ever been. There’s genuine alignment now on the problem statement — what’s required to make Europe the best place to start and scale entrepreneurial innovation. More policymakers get what needs fixing. The missions we talk about — Fix the Friction, Fund the Future, Empower Talent, Champion Risk — are all under active discussion at national and European levels. The political focus is there.

What matters now is design, delivery, and the will to act on the hard things. That’s where consistent ecosystem engagement becomes critical. If founders and operators are in the room through the design and delivery phase, you’re far more likely to end up with solutions people actually want and will use.

EU Inc shows what sustained, deep engagement can achieve — but also just how much energy and commitment it takes. That’s a replicable model. We need to apply it consistently across policy areas, not just one. To make that a success, it will require bold and ambitious policymaking, but also a tech community that is advocating publicly and helping make and win arguments.

🛣️ Road Ahead

• End of May: Tech sovereignty package “including the Cloud and AI Development Act (CAIDA), the Chips Act 2, a strategy on open source, and a “strategic roadmap” for digitalisation and AI in energy.”

• 8 – 12 June: London Tech Week

• 17 - 19 June: DG Progress will be at the Beyond Expo in Athens!

• 15-18 June: EP Plenary vote on the EU’s AI Omnibus

• Ongoing: negotiations over the EU’s Digital Omnibus package

🪟Window Seat

The best meme we’ve seen in the past month. Send us your favourites at dgprogress@progresschamber.org.

The EU’s executive taking a pop at those conspiring around the demise of Europe (a popular talking point among far-right voices who often – ironically! – reside outside the continent).

We’re excited in this month’s The Bridge to share a discussion we had with Benedict Evans, a renowned global tech analyst, about the EU’s trials and tribulations in becoming a digital superpower. Can better regulation help end Europe’s tech winter?

One element of renewal could be the long-awaited 28th Regime proposal, whose rainy reviews we summarise below. Alternatively, the EU’s tech sovereignty package could improve conditions, yet it continues to face controversy. The debate over what sovereignty actually means and what would be the best version for Europe goes on, with the EU’s industrialists urging the bloc to remain focused on its strengths and open to international partnerships rather than succumb to protectionist pressures.

But despite the policy headwinds, there is some light, as investments across the AI stack continue to pour into Europe.

🏗️ Making Progress

🇫🇷 Leaders gonna lead. French darling Mistral AI raised over €700 billion to build a new data centre near Paris, and released a new text-to-speech model.

🇳🇱 Flywheel in action. ASML alumni are behind a new Dutch start-up that claims to be building GPUs 100x more efficient than those currently on the market and is raising €100 million. Elsewhere in the Dutch ecosystem, Agentic AI platform Wonderful hit a €1.7 billion valuation after a successful series B funding round.

🇩🇪 German connections. SPRIN–D, a DARPA-inspired agency founded in Leipzig, announced a new fund aiming to support three frontier AI labs. German AI leader Aleph Alpha is also rumoured to be merging with Canada’s Cohere, in a move that envisions dual headquarters.

🇮🇹 Leaning in. Pisa-based CamGraPhic secured €211 million to build AI infrastructure, a boost provided by the EU’s State Aid Framework – one of the largest single public investments ever made in an Italian DeepTech startup.

🇸🇪 My dear Watson. Stockholm’s Legora, a legal AI company, aims to go global with a new campaign fronted by Jude Law targeting cities across Europe and the US.

🇪🇪Front seat view. Bolt announced a deal with NVIDIA to build the software required for its plans to scale self-driving cars across Europe, from 2026.

🇫🇷 Lucy in the sky. Paris-based Quendela will soon unveil a new quantum computer, Lucy, that could be the most powerful available to European researchers and companies.

🇪🇺 European Union getting in on the action …

• The European Investment Bank (EIB) Group announced it will significantly expand its European Tech Champions Initiative, pledging a further €15 billion to scale up innovative companies. It aims to mobilise €80 billion in private investments to close the funding gap European innovators face.

• Separately, the EIB announced multi-million euro investments in health scale-ups BioLamina 🇸🇪 and Orion Pharma 🇫🇮.

• Meanwhile, the European Commission confirmed it will invest over €1 billion in 57 defence projects (including AI and drones)

📉 … But needs help on product launches. The tool the EU is building to help its citizens verify their age online was immediately hacked and easily bypassed. Green MEP Markéta Gregorová described the process as “rushed under political pressure more than actual safety concerns.”

⛽ Policy Pitstop

• The 28th Regime proposal (mostly) disappointed. The long-awaited 28th Regime drew praise 🙋for being a Regulation rather than a Directive, for including a quick (< 48hrs) and convenient (online) incorporation, and for its improved stock and exit mechanisms for investors and founders. However, the overall sentiment is that it needs to be more ambitious:

  • “The test was always simple: does it provide as much legal certainty as the Delaware Inc? If not, founders and investors will continue to use Delaware Inc as a global investment standard,” according to the early warning from EU-INC campaigners in response to a leaked draft.

  • “Credit where it’s due - this is an important step that shows real effort to simplify business across Europe … but falls short of being a true 28th regime said Allied For Startups, raising concerns on the lack of a single EU registry, and how insolvency and restructuring remain fragmented.

  • Scaling across Europe is still curbed by national barriers, argued MEP Damian Boeselager.

  • “We needed more,” lamented Lucien Burm, President of the Dutch Startup Association, as companies will still face legal uncertainty.

  • “Significant gaps remain,” said the Association for Competitive Technology, noting the tax, employee, investment, and registry rules that are left to national governments.

  • “The law contains so many referrals to national law that it is more complex than the national systems it was meant to avoid,” concluded Silicon Continent.

  • While applauding the pushback on notaries, and the political will it took, three academics writing for Oxford Business Law argue for more: “The ambition that animated Letta and Draghi — and that this Commission has the mandate to act on — deserves a vehicle equal to it. EU Inc. could be that vehicle. It is not there yet.”

  • Others pushed back against some of this criticism. Notably, the President of the European Innovation Council Board, Michiel Scheffer dismissed the idea that centralising the legal systems would be desirable or feasible in the short term. France Digital took a more nuanced view that, while the EU Inc. is “a pivotal step forward, complementary measures remain essential, pointing to the need for further action on public procurement reform the Savings and Investment Union.

• Industrialists have come out against the EU’s upcoming tech sovereignty package (again delayed to the end of May), raising concerns that in the absence of international partnerships, European companies would be forced to rely on less optimal services.

  • We still don’t have all the details of what’s in the package, but it could be a “disaster”, says Siemens CEO Roland Busch, “you should not throttle your innovation speed for the sake of creating sovereignty”.

  • “Full sovereignty for any region worldwide is crazy, “ warned imec’s Chief Strategy Officer Jo De Boeck, “you need to have partnerships”.

  • “Welfare” for weak startups is how ex-Sequoia investor and Evantic founder Matt Miller described the idea, in an interview with Sifted.

• “Being an entrepreneur is often misunderstood and complex,” says the head of a new campaign aimed at giving French entrepreneurs a seat at the political table. 40 well-known builders signed on, including leaders from Ledger, Too Good To Go, and Aircall. Good to see others tapping into some of that DG Progress energy!

• Europe has the money, according to ECIPE’s Andrea Dugo, but it just doesn’t put it to work. Timely that the Commission is currently running a consultation on private equity exits to inform its Savings and Investment Union strategy.

🌉 The Bridge

Benedict Evans is one of the world’s most respected technology analysts, a seasoned venture partner, and author of a leading tech newsletter. We spoke to Benedict about the EU’s regulatory positioning, how laws impact product designs, and the importance of even AI adoption.

How is Brussels’ approach to regulation, especially in the digital space, viewed from potential investors and partners across the world?

When I talk to people in the Valley, there’s a perception that a lot of this is protectionism, which I don’t think anyone in Europe thinks it is.

The other thing is it’s such a big cultural conflict and an execution conflict. Americans are used to rules-based systems where you’re told what the rules are. They would come to Europe, and they thought the answer would be, “As long as you follow the principles, it’ll be fine.”

The problem is, if you’re Apple or Meta making changes to comply with new laws, you think this follows the principles, and you ask the EU for guidance and don’t get any feedback. Then they’d go home, wake up, and get an email that said, “Nope, you’re in breach, here’s a billion-dollar fine.” That gets a bunch of people in the Valley going to D.C., saying, “This is just bad faith. We tried to follow the rules.”

What do you make of the pushback that companies give when enforcers mandate specific design changes to their products because of a certain policy objective?

I wrote a piece a couple of years ago where I said that when you try to regulate any profession, they will always say no. I said you’ve just got to push in and say there are three kinds of “no.”

The first kind of “no” is, “We don’t want to, it’s a pain in the arse, it will cost us money, we don’t like that decision”—like putting seatbelts in the car. We think it’s dumb, maybe it isn’t dumb - whatever, we can do it if we have to.

The second kind of “no” is, “You’ve just asked us to give the Chinese access to all our internal data,” and you really didn’t realise that you were doing that. For cars, imagine you decide there could be a market for car engine replacement, so every car has to have one lever that you can pull that will disconnect the engine. You don’t really need to know anything about cars to know why that’s a really bad idea. You could do it, but again, a really, really bad idea with huge unintended consequences.

Then the third example is, “Yes, you need to make gasoline that doesn’t burn,” or “Please make secure encryption that the police can read. The problem is that the companies come back and say, “This is impossible, it will destroy our product, we can’t do it.”

Which is it? Which of those three “no’s” are they talking about? Is this WhatsApp saying, “No, we can’t give complete third-party interoperability?” Or is it people saying, “You have to scan everything for CSAM [child sexual abuse imagery], but also you’re not allowed to scan everything.”

Do you think that jurisdictions that fail to adopt or deploy AI are going to disadvantage themselves in the coming decades?

Yes. This is kind of true: if you stop deploying new technology, and this is the foundational new technology for the next 10 or 15 years, at a minimum. The base case is this is like cloud, or mobile, or open source, or PCs—it’s the new thing that everything in tech will get built around.

There’s an old joke that when the apocalypse comes, you want to be in France, because everything happens 10 years later there. You kind of see a layer of this in technology. If you look at the adoption data—everything from online advertising to e-commerce to business deployment of cloud, and now, how many people have used AI.

You’ve got the UK, the Nordics, and small northern countries like Benelux. In some cases, they had an adoption ahead of the USA. Then, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy are way behind. That applies across any metric you want to look at for technology adoption. That makes it tough to build a business on a pan-European scale.

🛣️ Road Ahead

• 27 April: European Commission consultation on private equity exits closes.

• End of April: The EU is due to announce who will manage a new €5 billion tech fund.

• April – June: Member States reviewing the 28th Regime proposal via Council Working Parties.

• 5 – 7 May: POLITICO’s AI & Tech Week 2026 (DG Progress will be there 🇧🇪)

• 7 – 8 May: EU Startups Summit 2026 (DG Progress will be there! 🇲🇹)

• End of May: Tech sovereignty package “including the Cloud and AI Development Act (CAIDA), the Chips Act 2, a strategy on open source, and a “strategic roadmap” for digitalisation and AI in energy.”

• 8 – 12 June: London Tech Week (DG Progress will be there! 🇬🇧)

• June: Vote on the EU’s AI Omnibus

🪟Window Seat

A new section dedicated to the best meme we’ve seen in the past month. Send us your favourites at DGProgress@progresschamber.org.

April’s Meme of the Month courtesy of EU-INC’s Andreas Klinger, caught surfing on LinkedIn.

… The time has come for the 28th Regime.

The EU is proposing a harmonised layer of corporate laws, above the 27 that apply within member states, to help companies set up and scale across the bloc. The European Commission is due to publish its proposal on Wednesday, setting off the negotiation process between the European Parliament and the EU’s member states.

A leaked version of the proposal indicates the Commission will opt for a Regulation rather than a Directive, which is an important step towards true harmonisation. We spoke with Damian Boeselager about why he’s been supporting EU-INC, the grassroots campaign advocating for this initiative.

Meanwhile, Europe should celebrate that it now attracts more tech workers from the US than vice versa (see below), but the real story is that transatlantic talent flows are narrowing for both sides. In the last month, we gained AI pioneer Yan LeCun, but we lost breakthrough agentic AI developer Peter Steinberger. Though we retain an edge, the competition for talent remains in the balance.

🏗️ Making Progress

🇪🇺 Silicon Canals? Capital for AI startups is pouring into Europe, and is set to smash 2025’s record. In the last month alone, Swedish legaltech firm Legora raised half a billion euros, French frontier AI developer AMI Labs raised over a billion euros (Europe’s largest ever seed round), British autonomous driving leader Wayve raised €1.5 billion (backed by Mercedes-Benz), and British AI infrastructure hyperscaler Nscale raised €2 billion (Europe’s largest ever Series C)

🇫🇷 🇧🇪 🇮🇹 Startup pipelines. In a textbook case of virtuous investment flows when companies can scale, French champion Mistral AI acquired cloud start-up Koyeb. Elsewhere, Italian tech firm Bending Spoons launched a €1.5 million fellowship fund for the brightest computer scientists at universities across the EU and UK. And in the heart of Europe, WAT, Brussels’ first tech incubator, gets its first funding round in the AI space.

🇪🇺 More Companies are Female-Founded than Ever Before… which is still a tragically-low 13% of the total, according to the new Female Innovation Index 2026. Europe can do better.

🇫🇷 🇩🇪 AI robotics are a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for Europe, given its “incredibly strong” industrial base, according to NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang. Right on cue, BMW deployed humanoid robots in one of its European factories for the first time, Montpellier-based health robotics company Quantum Surgical acquired an American subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, and Metzingen-based Neura Robots gained unicorn status after raising €1 billion.

🇫🇷 🇫🇮 Quantum leaps. French quantum startup Pasqal went public at a €2 billion valuation. Just a few days after, Finnish quantum computing company IQM Quantum Computers has reached a €1.6bn pre-money valuation. Europe is proving to be a leader in gaining funding for deep tech.

🇬🇧 🇩🇪 🇺🇦 Lift off for European defence tech. Anglo-German defence start-up Hypersonica successfully tested Europe’s first hypersonic missile (capable of travelling in the inner atmosphere several times faster than the speed of sound). Meanwhile, the Pentagon is eyeing Ukrainian drones to fend off Iranian drone attacks. How’s that for sovereignty?

⛽ Policy Pitstop

• AI Act under fire from EU tech leaders. In their annual community letter, Stripe co-founders from Ireland, Patrick and John Collison, labelled the regulation “a well-intentioned yet counterproductive burden,” while DeepL CEO Jaroslaw Kutylowski warned the bill is a “competitiveness disadvantage when it comes to attracting talent and new companies to Germany and the EU.”

“If you don’t embrace change and innovation, you will fall behind, and in Europe’s case, this means falling even further behind. So please, let’s finally start having a more positive and open mindset and embrace change and opportunities.” – Eric Demuth, President of Austria’s Bitpanda.

• “I am working to make the AI Act more practical,” says Renew MEP Svenja Hahn, who’s helping draft suggestions to simplify the bill, which could include excluding non-consumer B2B uses of AI, clearer rules for data processing, and realistic enforcement timelines (something we’ve written about here).

• Making cookie banners more practical as well? The European Commission’s Omnibus plan to eliminate cookie banners could use some improvement, we’ve written here.

• European interests in mind. The EU’s top civil servant for digital policy, Roberto Viola, pushed back against critics claiming the simplification agenda is a design of Big US firms (echoing our analysis last month). This theory is “factually incorrect,” he said, “The truth is that there are hundreds of start-ups that have serious problems in applying and knowing how to apply the GDPR in the context of AI.” We’ve written about how the EU should reform its data law here.

• Compliancemaxxing is the issue Europe faces, according to Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, quoting research that shows “twice as many people in the EU work on implementing and monitoring rules as those working on innovative research.”

• Expert advice: join EU-INC. A government-commissioned expert group “strongly recommends” that the German government join the EU-INC party. If not all EU member states can agree to a Regulation, the experts recommend Germany should join the “enhanced cooperation” mechanism for keen countries; if that fails, they propose a Franco-German agreement to which other countries are later free to join.

🌉 The Bridge

You are one of the strongest supporters of EU-INC. What has captured you personally or politically about this movement?

Competitiveness is our [the EU’s] core priority, but when it comes to the internal market, we have done nothing. Why is EU-INC cool? Because it helps investors understand corporate forms in Europe more easily. That’s one of the largest benefits because you know your voting rights and shareholder rights when you invest, especially if you don’t have to travel to that country for that investment to sign in front of a notary. … It was very clear to me that I would support EU-INC as much as possible.

You’ve been touring Europe, meeting founders from Helsinki, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and other European hubs. What lessons are you bringing back to policymakers here in Brussels?

What I heard from European founders and what I saw from founders in the US is that what’s important is the ease of opening the business, having a standard corporate form, being able to operate in European countries, hire people across the continent, and give them shares without complexity.

One of the things that I heard most is, “Okay, so when does [EU-INC] work? When can I get it?” When I say, “in three years”, it is because we have one year of negotiations and then two years of implementing a Directive; they have already lost interest. There’s a feeling of ‘you’re not hearing us’.

The 28th Regime proposal is due on the 18th. How can founders and investors continue to support this initiative?

I hear all the voices loudly, but I don’t hear a very loud institutionalised voice from VCs and startups. We must use the European network of startups and scale-ups to create pressure points at the right moments in time, and we can help by explaining when these pressure points exist and what is being discussed and negotiated.

However long the process is, if it’s one month or three years or longer, we need to make sure that we keep the pressure up. Because, in the end, the Commission President really put a lot of political capital into this one word (EU-INC). It’s time we hold her accountable to her promise.

🛣️ Road Ahead

• 18 March – The long-awaited 28th Regime is set to be published on Wednesday.

• 18 March – European Parliament committees are set to vote on their position for plans to simplify AI rules (its “AI Omnibus”), with negotiations with EU member states set for April. We provided our thoughts on this initiative here.

• 16 – 26 March – the next round of stakeholder workshops discussing the AI Act’s Transparency Code of Practice will take place. We wrote about our concerns with the process we observed in the first round here.

• April – the EU’s new Scaleup Europe Fund, the largest funding instrument ever deployed at the EU level, will select a fund manager in April, with a summer launch planned.

Hello, welcome to DG Progress* by Chamber of Progress, a tech industry business group working toward a fairer, more inclusive society. Our focus: promoting EU competitiveness, showcasing the positive impact of European technology, and bridging the gap between innovators and policymakers.

Europe is not at the mercy of industrial change; we are tech leaders with world-class talent and ambitions, global partnerships, and a prosperous single market. With the right policies, the continent can speed up its progress while defending what it means to be European. The Commission doesn’t have a Directorate General dedicated to this, but maybe it should.

Each month we’ll spotlight the entrepreneurs and policymakers building a better Europe from the ground up— and share ways you can get involved.

Thanks for reading,
Kay Jebelli and Patrick Grady
The DG Progress team

*not affiliated with the European Commission

🏗️ Making Progress

European founders have faced an uphill battle navigating Member State formalities as they scale across Europe. It’s often easier to incorporate in Delaware, not only for the deeper US capital markets, but because some of the national requirements are truly medieval (think, ink signatures, wax seals, and oral review of shareholder agreements). For the first time, a grassroots campaign has pushed a solution to create a single market for entrepreneurship onto the European stage.

🇪🇺 “We call it EU Inc.” President of the European Commission, Von der Leyen, finally endorsed the pan-European movement and crowdsourced proposal for a nimble, single corporate solution for European founders setting up and scaling up across the continent.

🇩🇪 The Start-up Party. Volt’s Co-Founder & MEP Damian Boeselgar has emerged as the European Parliament’s Advocate-in-Chief for start-ups, urging the EU to speed up the proposal and speaking to founders across the continent. But it looks like he’ll have some work to do, because early leaks leave a lot to be desired.

🇩🇪 Walk The Talk. EU Inc co-founder and investor Andreas Klinger has launched a Europe-focused fund doubling down on Europe’s world-class manufacturing capabilities. Already attracting deep interest, the future of European industry is clearly bright.

🇩🇪 Outgunned. Rheinmetall will soon be able to produce more artillery shells than the entire US defence industry, reported the Wall Street Journal. How’s that for sovereignty?

🇪🇺 Chips-Act in Action. The launch of a €2.5bn chips research hub in Leuven, Belgium was an occasion to remind the world that the EU already has world leading semiconductor technologies. “It’s true that we do have some of the key technologies, like ASML, that everyone is dependent [on] globally,” said European Commission’s Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen.

🇫🇷🇧🇪 Sovereignty Unicorns. Defence tech startup Harmattan AI received a boost from compatriot Dassault Aviation to bring its valuation over the €1bn mark. Akido Security, a startup which automates cybersecurity vulnerability finding and fixing, also reached unicorn status.

⛽ Policy Pitstop

• Should I Stay or Should I Go? That’s the question Allies for Startups is asking on behalf of EU businesses in a new Brussels-wide campaign. Heavy regulatory burdens are a big part of the story, and why simplification is critical for European competitiveness.

• Why do ⅓ of Europe’s most innovative companies move abroad? Capital, regulatory burdens, and large unified markets, says new research from the European Investment Bank. All the more reason for an EU-INC solution.

• Listen to European companies, we told critics of the EU’s simplification agenda.

• “We have far exceeded the limit of overregulation,” Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart De Wever writes in his new book, “None of the global leading companies in this sector is European. And yet we pat ourselves on the back because we’re the first continent with far-reaching AI regulation.”

• Slow down AI Act enforcement until proper standards are available, we wrote, echoing calls from EU AI companies and startups, to avoid uncertainty and chaos that would harm the AI ecosystem.

👉 Roger Dassen, CFO of ASML, back in October: “We started with regulating, to keep AI under the thumb. Someone who has a talent for artificial intelligence, the first they thing do with hard-earned money… is buy a ticket to Silicon Valley”

🌉 The Bridge

Where did the idea for EU-INC come from?

Investing across the EU is currently prohibitive. No one is able to understand all 27 legislative environments, and the likelihood of failure in startups only intensifies the risk of legal “gotcha’s”. Early-stage investment in all of Europe is the key to more momentum and success: Startups are a game of numbers. We simply need 100X the amount of startups for 10X the amount of unicorns, and a serious chance at the first Trillion-EUR company.

Can you talk about the disconnect between what EU companies need and the policy conversation happening in Brussels? What’s missing?

I clearly see a disconnect between theory and practice. Where Brussels on one side thinks of studies, policies, regulations, directives and law, entrepreneurs think in products, user adoption and growth. Naturally for the startup community the EU-INC must be an online service, where you login, found a company, raise money from investors and sell shares. This deficiency could prevent an ambitious EU-INC proposal by the Commission, and the implementation could suffer in its translation to an actual product.

Where were you when you heard the European Commission President, Von der Leyen, name-drop the EU, and what’s next for the movement?

We were actually in our weekly call with the EU-INC team, when one of us in parallel, listened to her speech, and told everyone to hold their thoughts and listen. That was quite the surprise. The next step is to critically review the proposal expected for March 18th from the Commission, and hopefully provide constructive solutions to make it a founder’s first solution to found, fund and scale innovation across the EU.

🛣️ Road Ahead

• 12 February: Dream team assembling. EU leaders are convening to discuss the bloc’s competitiveness ambitions. With both former Prime Ministers Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta in attendance, there will be pressure on less ambitious Member States to focus on what Europe really needs in the world ahead.

• 13 March: Digital Omnibus Consultation. The EU is looking for feedback on how to simplify its digital rulebook. Have your say before the deadline here.

• TBC March: EU Inc. launch. The EU will present its plans for EU Inc (nee 28th regime?), sometime in March, with a rollout currently scheduled for 2027.

• TBC March: More competitiveness proposals due. The Commission is also set to release proposals for the European Innovation Act, Cloud and AI Development Act, and Chips Act.