Invest Europe

How does venture capital support tech innovation in Europe?

Videos

2:10

•

06 Jan 2016

From 2010 to 2014 venture capital invested in more than 10,000 European companies. The vast majority of these were tech start-ups.

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In 2015 the EU put venture capital at the heart of proposals to boost Europe’s economy and help more innovative companies change the business landscape.

The video was filmed at Invest Europe's VC Forum 2015.

It features insight from:

Frederic Court, Founder and Managing Partner at Felix Capital

Filip Dames, Managing Partner at Cherry Ventures

Joe Schorge, Founder and Managing Partner at Isomer Capital

Mattias Ljungman, Partner at Atomico

Julie Meyer, Chairman and Chief Executive at Ariadne Capital

Read Transcript

Technology is changing everything. Those trends that we see operating on a global scale are also happening in Europe. We see a lot of founders actually working on these types of ideas where an industry that has been working probably quite statically the same way for 10-20 years is now really game changing into something new.

We really see that Europe is producing a lot of great entrepreneurs, a lot of great companies. These companies obviously need venture capital helping them to grow and to become successful. Venture capital has been the most effective way that raw tech research gets productized and gets into the market. I believe if you want to build a big company then you need access to capital and you also need access to funds that are able to deploy checks that are significant. To be able to create a billion dollar company you need around 250 million dollars. The capital needs to come in at every single stage.

We have done a great job over the last few years of getting the seed and series A stage going and we have a proliferation of good companies coming out. But then we need to think about how we satisfy the future capital demands of these companies and also make sure that we retain that value and are able to deliver further value for investors. It is about activating that long term view about how we make venture capital and the financing of entrepreneurship a source for long term growth and sustainable economics in Europe.