Hello there,
We’re starting the week by looking at Balderton Capital and its new campaign “Built in Europe” featuring more than 100 founders from across the continent, including leaders from Revolut, Mistral AI, Wayve, ElevenLabs, Synthesia, Alan, Voi, Lovable, Quantum Systems, Proxima Fusion, and The Exploration Company.
Unlike most ecosystem campaigns, Built in Europe is not really trying to convince founders that Europe can build successful companies. It is arguing that Europe already has.
source: Built in Europe
The campaign spans London, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, and Munich, appearing on billboards, startup hubs, and digital advertising screens across Europe’s largest technology ecosystems.
Why Does Europe Still Doubt Itself?
European tech has spent much of the last decade trying to answer the same question: Can Europe build companies that compete on the global stage?
For years, discussions about European innovation have often started with what the continent lacks. Less venture capital than in the United States. Fewer technology giants. Smaller public markets. Slower scaling companies.
The narrative has frequently been one of catching up.
Yet the list of companies backing this campaign tells a different story.
Revolut serves more than 70 million customers across 40 countries. ElevenLabs powers millions of voice agents in dozens of languages. Synthesia is used by 90% of the Fortune 100. Wayve’s autonomous vehicles have driven through more than 500 cities worldwide. Mistral has emerged as one of the world’s most prominent AI companies.
If Europe is already producing world-class companies, why does the conversation still often focus on whether it can?
The Gap Between Performance and Perception
One of the more interesting aspects of the Built in Europe campaign is that it is not primarily focused on the driving factors: capital, regulation, or policy, but it’s focused on confidence.
Balderton claims that European tech suffers from a perception problem that increasingly bears little relation to its actual results.
The evidence extends beyond the companies featured in the campaign itself. Europe’s technology workforce has more than doubled since 2016, growing to approximately 4.6 million people. Around 3 million now work for European-headquartered technology companies, up from 59% of the continent’s tech workforce a decade ago to roughly 65% today.
Meanwhile, Europe continues to produce nearly 30% of the world’s founders, maintaining one of the largest entrepreneurial talent pools globally despite growing competition from Asia and the Middle East.
Yet much of the public conversation continues to frame Europe as a challenger ecosystem rather than an established one.
For many founders involved in the campaign, Europe no longer needs validation from Silicon Valley or comparisons to other ecosystems. The argument is that the continent should be judged by the companies it has already produced rather than by assumptions about what it cannot produce.
Can Narrative Change an Ecosystem?
Skeptics may argue that billboards do not create startups, and they are right. More advertising alone will not solve Europe’s structural challenges, nor will it automatically produce the next generation of global technology leaders.
The billboard and media attention draw the ecosystem’s attention for a while, so why not double down and invest it all in talent infrastructure? Connect ambitious builders with the companies already scaling across the continent.
So, alongside the marketing effort, Built in Europe launched a jobs platform aggregating opportunities from what Balderton describes as Europe’s top 1,000 technology startups.
Built in Europe arrives at a moment when European tech appears caught between two competing narratives. One argues that Europe remains structurally disadvantaged and still has significant work to do. The other argues that Europe has already entered a new phase and simply has not updated its self-image. The tension between those views sits at the center of the current debate.
The reality is probably somewhere in between. Europe still faces real challenges, but it is also producing global companies at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine a decade ago.
Europe’s Talent Story Is Changing Faster Than Its Reputation
One of the less discussed changes in European tech is that the continent’s talent base is evolving far faster than its reputation.
Around 65% of Europe’s technology workforce is employed by European-headquartered startups and scaleups today, up from 59% a decade ago. The growth of homegrown technology champions is no longer creating isolated success stories. It is creating entire talent ecosystems around them.
The trend is becoming visible across the founder landscape as well.
Europe continues to account for nearly 30% of the world’s founders, maintaining one of the largest entrepreneurial talent pools globally. At the same time, company creation is accelerating. The number of people starting companies in Europe reached record levels in 2025, nearly 59% higher than a few years ago and even exceeding the peaks of the 2021 venture boom. While much of the conversation continues to focus on Europe’s scaling challenges, the continent is producing founders faster than ever before.
Perhaps most tellingly, sentiment is beginning to change alongside the numbers. According to Atomico’s latest State of European Tech survey, 42% of respondents now believe it is more attractive to start a company in Europe than it was a year earlier. Just two years ago, only around a quarter shared that view. Optimism has increased among founders, investors, and LPs alike.
That does not mean Europe has solved its talent challenge. The continent continues to compete aggressively with the United States, Canada, Australia, and increasingly Asia for founders, engineers, and experienced operators. Net talent inflows remain positive, but they have slowed in recent years as global competition for skilled workers intensifies.
If Balderton’s campaign is built on the idea that Europe has a confidence problem, the talent data suggests there may finally be a reason for that confidence.
Beyond Confidence: What Actually Builds an Ecosystem?
In our recent conversation with Kibo Ventures Partner Sonia Fernández, she argued that venture capital has already entered a new phase where founders often choose investors as carefully as investors choose founders. As capital becomes more abundant, trust, reputation, and operational support increasingly become the factors that differentiate investors.
Meanwhile, Sion Evans of VenCap International also talked about a similar dynamic from the LP perspective. According to Evans, the most important driver of long-term venture performance remains access to managers who can consistently back the world’s best entrepreneurs. In his view, repeatable access to exceptional founders remains the ultimate scarce resource in venture capital.
Both perspectives point toward the same conclusion: as European technology ecosystems mature, talent itself may become the most important competitive advantage.
🌍 Across the Ecosystem | Talent, Trust, and Access
The Built in Europe campaign focuses heavily on confidence, but confidence alone does not build ecosystems. The real question is what founders and investors do once talent, capital, and ambition begin to concentrate in one place.
Here are some of the latest conversations we’ve heard across the ecosystem.
Podcast | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers & Labour
In a recent conversation with Harry Stebbings, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Alex Rampell argued that the best founders excel at one thing above all else: materialising resources that do not yet exist.
Whether it is capital, customers, or talent, exceptional founders have an unusual ability to attract and concentrate these assets around their vision.
Podcast | Europe Has MIT-Level Talent. So, Why Are We Losing It?
In a recent episode of The Recursive Roundtable, cybersecurity founders, investors, and operators explored a question that sits at the heart of Europe's technology ambitions: if Europe has world-class technical talent, why does it still struggle to retain and scale it?
The discussion points out Central and Eastern Europe's growing strength in cybersecurity, AI, and digital identity, while acknowledging persistent challenges around brain drain, late-stage funding, and scaling companies beyond local markets.
Let’s Continue the Conversation at 0100 Emerging Europe
These themes will continue at 0100 Emerging Europe 2026 in Budapest (23–24 September), where private equity, venture capital, private wealth, and institutional investors will gather to explore how capital is moving across the broader Central and Eastern European region.
The agenda includes discussions on allocation trends, the scale-up funding gap, strategic autonomy, secondaries and liquidity solutions, defense and dual-use innovation, and what LPs are looking for in managers today.
We look forward to continuing the discussion in Budapest.