Highlights 2024

From the CEO

Private capital is an industry with a simple concept at its core: building better businesses. Yet we navigate complex waters, balancing volatile market conditions, changing political priorities, and increasing regulatory pressures among other factors.

Invest Europe has been helping its members meet these challenges for over four decades, while guiding the industry’s reputation with the world at large. In 2024, we drew on all our collective experience to bring clarity to what private capital does and how it can make a difference – for Europe’s economy and society.

In a year when the European Union went to the polls, alongside many other developed and emerging economies around the globe, we launched and championed our policy agenda for the 2024-2029 period. The publication of Forward highlighted the ways in which private capital can support European priorities – from innovation and climate action to infrastructure investment and sovereignty – and gave recommendations to unlock the flow of investment to support those goals. The release of our agenda was backed by meetings with key policymakers and regulators, a cocktail launch evening in Brussels attended by over 200 key stakeholders, and a communications campaign that expanded visibility and engagement across Europe and beyond.

The launch of Forward provides a compelling snapshot of how Invest Europe works as an organisation to support members and the essential work they do. Wherever possible, our teams come together to maximise their impact – drawing on Invest Europe’s authoritative data and research, our public affairs experience and contacts, the reach and engagement of our communications channels, and our events and training expertise to take our messages further and wider.

In 2024, our success came not only from internal collaboration but also external partnerships. Our ground-breaking new study in partnership with the European Union Intellectual Property Office – Protecting European Innovation: Private equity’s role in European Intellectual Property Rights – highlighted the positive relationship between private equity and venture capital investments and trade marks and patents at companies. The result is a demonstration of our industry’s impact on the hallmarks of innovation in Europe – again aligning with EU policy priorities as the continent seeks to boost competitiveness on a global stage.

Some of our partnerships have proved so successful that we explore ways to deepen and extend those ties. Following on from our past work with the European Investment Fund on VC Factor reports, we joined forces with the EIF to advocate for the role of the VC ecosystem at a time when public funding pressures are acute. Our aim is to raise our voice – in harmony with one of Europe’s largest and most respected investment institutions – to make it easier for private capital to back start-ups and scale-ups that can drive European growth.

Other collaborations are not only for our members, but with our members. Our industry voices campaign included 24 leader interviews and 11 articles by Invest Europe members and experts. The outputs reached hundreds of thousands of our followers on social media with inspiring messages about our industry’s work. You can read more about this and all Invest Europe’s 2024 highlights below.

We are delighted to share our past successes each year. But, as the title of our agenda Forward suggests, Invest Europe is constantly looking to the future. We are focused on key challenges – such as climate change and the drive to net zero, or AI and digitalisation – and how to transform those into opportunities for our members. A stronger Europe needs the collaboration of the private capital industry if we are to meet all our shared goals.

Eric de Montgolfier
Chief Executive Officer