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EE|Times EUROPE

EDITOR’S LETTER

European Startups

Weathering

the Storm

WITH OR WITHOUT the Covid-19
pandemic, technology has continued to
blossom in Silicon Valley and China’s 100 Startups
great cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and
Shenzhen. How about Europe: Boom, bust, Worth Watching
or stagnation?
European entrepreneurs have long in 2021
envied their Silicon Valley counterparts
— with good reason. Financing rounds,
often jaw-droppers over there, have been more in the millions or tens
of millions of euros over here. The current crisis could have widened
the gap, especially given that Europe is struggling to overcome eco-
nomic lag from the United States and Asia. The European tech sector,
however, proved imaginative and creative over the past year. Despite
severe headwinds, a significantly high number of entrepreneurs took
the startup plunge, and venture capital investors have continued to be
active in the seed and early stages.
In a December report, London-based VC firm Atomico estimated
that total investment in the continent’s tech industry exceeded
US$41 billion in 2020, a record for Europe. Of course, this figure was
far behind the US$141 billion that VC funds poured into U.S. technol-
ogy startups or the US$74 billion invested in Asian tech startups. But
the trend continues to head in the right direction in every corner of
the continent.
VC investment in U.K. tech hit a record US$15 billion in 2020, and
deep-tech investment rose by 17%, the highest rate of growth globally,
according to Tech Nation. Similarly, France’s VC investments increased
sevenfold between 2014 and 2020, and foreign investors are now pres-
ent in more than 25% of fundraising, according to France Digitale.
Europe’s great strength is its pool of tech talent. Atomico reported
that Europe has more than 6 million professional developers and is
experiencing steady growth, in contrast to the U.S., where the pro-
fessional developer base has been static for the past two years. The
continent is also home to prominent engineering universities, such as
Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, the Netherlands’ Delft University of Tech-
nology, France’s École normale supérieure, and the U.K.’s University
of Cambridge.
We haven’t even mentioned the engineering-cost and tax advan-
tages in Ireland that have encouraged some companies, such as Did your favorite
AnDapt and Navitas Semiconductor, to relocate their headquarters —
but that’s a topic for another time. startup make the cut?
Promising European startups pop up every day in areas such as arti-
ficial intelligence, edge processing, neuromorphic computing, memory,
microelectromechanical systems and sensors, and power management.
To support them today is to solve the problems of tomorrow. ■

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— Anne-Françoise Pelé, editor-in-chief of EE Times Europe
EE Times Store.
www.eetimes.eu | JUNE 2021