EU props up €90B investors club to plug tech funding gap

Seventy-one investors joined the club, representing more than €90 billion in assets, according to a Commission official. Among the investors is the NATO Innovation Fund.

The official added that among the investors are United Kingdom-based Atomico (backer of European fintech companies such as Stripe and Klarna) and Sweden’s EQT, as well as state-funded investors like French Bpifrance and Dutch Invest-NL.

Last week, a Commission expert group painted a grim picture of the chances of scaling tech in Europe.

“The EU is comparatively weaker than the U.S. and China with regard to the uptake, commercialization and scaling of new technologies,” the expert group, chaired by former Portuguese tech minister Manuel Heitor, wrote in an evaluation report of Horizon Europe, the bloc’s flagship R&D program.

Europe’s technology gap is the Continent’s “single biggest long-term challenge,” veteran German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger said in an interview with POLITICO.

The Commission’s approach to plug the tech funding gap differs from earlier efforts.