A decade ago, European founders who wanted to build a global tech company had one real option: move to the US. Today, Romain Mombert, growth investor at Eurazeo, sees a fundamentally different picture — and he’s cautiously optimistic. In this episode of 0100 Impact Talks, Mombert breaks down what’s changed in European tech, where the real funding gap lies, and why fixing one structural problem in how pension funds allocate capital could close the distance between Europe and Silicon Valley faster than most people think.
From Local Champions to Day-One Global
Mombert has spent over a decade investing in growth-stage European tech, and the shift he’s witnessed is significant. When he started, European software companies were largely local champions — fragmented across the continent, targeting enterprise clients in their home markets. Today, it’s not unusual to meet a Series A founder already generating 70% of their revenue in the US.
“The ecosystem has matured a lot,” he says. Part of that maturity comes from what he calls the “European mafias” — the executive talent that emerged from companies like Spotify, SAP, and Booking.com, built global businesses, and is now recycling that experience into the next generation of European startups. Eurazeo Growth goes further, bringing in operating partners with 30-plus years of experience scaling companies like Datadog and Automation Anywhere to advise its portfolio founders on US go-to-market strategy.
Mistral AI is his sharpest illustration of how much has changed: from zero to a billion-dollar valuation in three years, selling globally from day one.
The US Go-to-Market Imperative — and Its Limits
Mombert is direct about why Eurazeo pushes its portfolio companies to sell in the US as early as possible: sales cycles are simply shorter there. Even for large enterprise deals, US corporates move faster than their European counterparts. In Europe, purchasing decisions — especially with large corporations and public institutions — carry more scrutiny, more bureaucracy, and more risk aversion toward working with startups.
“The US corporate sees less risk in working with a startup,” he explains. “In Europe, in big groups and public institutions, that can be seen as a risk rather than an opportunity.”
But he’s careful not to frame this as a permanent European weakness. The wave of tech sovereignty initiatives sweeping the continent — from the French state reducing its Microsoft dependency to the European Commission directing cloud contracts to European providers — is creating a new procurement logic. He draws an analogy to Airbus: public institutions providing early order flow to build a viable European alternative, which then became world-class on its own terms.
The revenue split he’s targeting for portfolio companies is roughly 40% US, 30% Europe, 30% rest of world — global from the start, not sequential market conquest.
Better Product, Half the Funding
One of the more striking observations Mombert makes is about capital efficiency. European companies like Dataiku entered the US market having raised half the money at half the valuation of their American peers — and still managed to win on product quality. Cognizant, another Eurazeo portfolio company, had the best product feedback in its category despite competing against a US rival twice its size.
“In many cases, the European company has the better product,” he says. And Europe’s engineering advantage isn’t going away. The continent produces twice the number of engineering graduates per year as the US in absolute terms. Germany’s percentage of engineering students is more than double that of the US. Five of the top ten universities by global ranking are European. In quantum computing and industrial robotics, Europe is ahead.
Where it falls short is compute infrastructure — the US is currently building roughly ten times more AI compute capacity than Europe — and, most critically, capital at the growth stage.
The 35 Trillion Problem
Here is where Mombert gets specific, and the numbers are striking.
European pension funds and insurers collectively manage around €35 trillion. In the US, pension funds have been allocating capital to venture and growth since the 1970s, when regulatory hurdles were removed. US pension funds invest roughly 2% of assets under management into venture and growth. European pension funds invest approximately 0.1% — twenty times less, proportionally.
And of that 0.1%, around 70% goes to US funds, not European ones, because US funds carry longer track records that pass institutional investment committees.
“That’s the biggest thing to solve,” Mombert says. “If we raise that to 1 or 2%, we solve the funding gap entirely. Tomorrow.”
The solution he advocates is twofold: first, remove the regulatory barriers that prevent European pension funds from allocating more to alternative equity; second, create incentives for them to direct that capital toward European funds rather than defaulting to US managers. He cites Italy as an early mover — the country has already reduced the regulatory hurdles for pension funds investing in local venture — but argues it needs to happen at a European scale, not country by country.
The European Commission’s Scale-Up Fund is a step in this direction, bringing together pension capital from Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy in a single vehicle targeting €3–5 billion for European tech and deep tech growth stage. But Mombert is clear that one fund is not enough — “we need three to five of them.”
Three Phases, One Trajectory
Mombert frames European tech’s evolution across three decades. In the 2000s, European founders who wanted to scale had to move entirely to the US — talent and capital both followed. The biggest IPOs of recent years, Snowflake, Datadog, and Shopify, were built by European founding teams who relocated. In the 2010s, the second generation kept the talent in Europe but still had to move headquarters to the US to access serious growth capital.
Now, in the AI era, a third phase is emerging. Mistral raised a billion euros and stayed in Paris. Yann LeCun, despite being courted with larger checks in the US, chose to build from Europe. Companies are keeping their headquarters and their talent on the continent while raising capital that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
“Impossible in the 2000s, hard to think in the 2010s, and now it’s happening,” Mombert says.
His optimism is structural, not sentimental. The engineering base is there. The entrepreneurial caliber is there. The capital exists — it’s just not yet pointed in the right direction. Fix the pension fund allocation problem, reduce sales friction with European corporates and public institutions, and he sees no fundamental reason why European tech can’t reach parity with the US.
“There has never been a better tech ecosystem in Europe. The quality is very high.”
