To Compete in the Global Economy, Europe Needs to Boost Its VC Ecosystem

Governments worldwide recognize the importance of promoting high-potential start-ups and the institutions that fund them. Europe is no exception. In 2024, Mario Draghi, a former President of the European Central Bank and one-time Italian Prime Minister lamented in an influential report on European competitiveness that “no EU company with a market capitalization over EUR 100 billion…has been set up from scratch in the last fifty years, while all six U.S. companies with a valuation above EUR 1 trillion have been created in this period.”