By James Brocket, Managing Partner, Calibre One
That line that I borrowed, from Atomico’s Camilla Richards from her excellent essay Europe creates global value. Now Regulators need to help us keep the rewards, landed harder than many things I’ve read about European tech this year. Because it’s not pessimism, it’s an honest assessment of a deep structural problem that we see every day. That is that we have some of the world’s finest minds creating some of the most consequential technology that has ever been created, but that is then largely monetised in the US.
EQT and McKinsey published research in March 2026 showing that European tech companies worth more than €700 billion left the continent between 2014 and 2025 through overseas listings or acquisition by non-European buyers. By January 2026, the current value of those same companies had grown to €1.2 trillion. [EQT / McKinsey, March 2026]
Atomico’s State of European Tech 2025 put the same story in a different frame: Europe now generates 17% of new global enterprise value, but captures only 10% of global exit value. We are, in effect, subsidising the returns of others. [State of European Tech 2025]
There are two well-known cases worth naming because the numbers are so staggering with DeepMind being the most high-profile and arguably most important. It was founded in London in 2010, sold to Google in 2014 for $650 million. DA Davidson analysts estimated the combined value of Alphabet’s AI and DeepMind assets at over $700 billion by 2026. The other is ARM, the Cambridge chip maker that powers most of the world’s mobile devices sold to SoftBank in 2016 for $32B and today is valued at $330B.
One of Europe’s greatest tech entrepreneurs: Daniel Ek has said publicly that too many European founders sell too early and that the collective mindset is “too short-term.” He’s right about the diagnosis and he has backed that conviction with €1 billion of his own capital invested in European tech. But why does this keep happening?
There are three reasons, in my view – all connected.
- Capital. Atomico estimates Europe has underfunded its technology companies by $375 billion over the past decade. The funding gap hits hardest at the scale-up stage and US companies are twice as likely to have raised $50 million or more than their European counterparts. European pension funds allocate 0.01% of AUM to venture capital versus 0.03% in the US. That three-times gap, if closed, could apparently unlock an estimated $210 billion for European tech over the next decade. The proposed EU-INC framework and the UK’s NOVA and Venture Link schemes are steps in the right direction, but as with a lot of things in UK plc, the pace is slow relative to the scale of the structural problem.
- Exit infrastructure. European companies raised $51.1 billion in IPOs on EU exchanges in 2025, against $74.2 billion on US exchanges. The liquidity premium for listing in New York remains real, even as the geopolitical environment shifts and European market infrastructure improves. Exit activity globally nearly doubled in 2025, but Europe accounted for only 10% of that value, well short of the 30% by 2030 target. [VivaTech, Nov 2025] The good news: ScaleX Invest data from mid-2026 shows the gap between European private and public market pricing is narrowing, and exit multiples are expected to improve in H2 2026. The conditions for more European exits are building, albeit slowly. [CMOtech, August 2026]
- Leadership at scale. This is the part that largely flies under the radar, but it’s what we at Calibre One spend most of our working lives on. When a European tech company reaches the point where it needs a CEO who can lead it to a premium exit, who can manage the investor narrative, run an M&A process, build the board infrastructure for a public listing, and sustain the growth trajectory that justifies a top-quartile multiple? That profile has historically been hard to find in Europe, and easier to find in the US. So companies either imported the leadership, or sold before the question became urgent. We wrote about this in detail in our recent piece on how the B2B technology CEO role has changed over the past decade.
The encouraging shift, and there is one, is that Europe’s leadership talent pool has genuinely deepened. The State of European Tech 2025 reports 4.6 million people in the European tech workforce, growing at a rate that now outpaces the US. 81% of European AI founders are now building from within Europe, up from 74% in 2016. The brain drain story is real with senior AI engineers in Europe earning significantly less than their counterparts in the US. [Euronews January 2026] But this is no longer the only story. The secondary effects of companies like DeepMind being absorbed into Alphabet are not entirely negative. 112 DeepMind alumni have launched new startups since Q2 2025, with UK and European ventures accounting for a third of them, and total funding for those offshoots exceeding $5B [TechRepublic, May 2026]
There is plenty of evidence that the ecosystem flywheel is gaining some momentum, but this is a shift that is still frustratingly slow by its very nature.
The question I’d put to the boards and sponsors of growth companies in Europe is this: when your company reaches the point where the exit path is being designed, is the leadership team you have the one that will maximise the value you’ve built, or just the one that got you here? Sometimes they are the same but more often than the industry acknowledges, they are not.
In Europe, we build great companies. The work of keeping the value, the talent and the knowledge and the compounding returns, here in Europe is as much about leadership as it is about policy and ambition.