Pan-EU Fund-of-Funds

VC public funding

A key part of the Capital Markets Union Action Plan, VentureEU is the EU’s pan-European venture capital fund-of-funds programme. It demonstrates how EU funding can act as a catalyst for private sector investment and has three objectives. First, to increase the size and scale of venture capital funds in Europe; second, to attract additional private funding into EU venture capital; and finally, to overcome the current fragmentation in European VC.

To achieve these goals, the EU has committed to providing cornerstone funding of up to €410 million. The selected fund managers are expected to raise at least three times as much from other sources, with the EU's investment capped at 25% of the total. The scheme is expected to trigger an estimated €6.5 billion of new investment in innovative start-up and scale-up companies across Europe, substantially adding to the amount of venture capital available in Europe.

How does it affect private equity?

VentureEU is a great opportunity for those pension funds, insurers and sovereign wealth funds from Europe and further afield that have struggled to invest in European venture capital because the size of their minimum investment is simply too large to be absorbed by the average European venture capital fund. The fund-of-funds will pool their commitments with capital from the EU budget to invest with some of the best venture capital managers across the continent. And those managers, in turn, will back the most promising innovations and ideas.