Category Archives: Research

Italy moves too slow and it needs to accelerate significantly.
This was the main diagnosis emerging from our last year report.
One year later, the scenario has not changed. Italy still ranks 11th in the European Scaleup Europe ranking. And the gap from the top has become even wider. Moving slow in the world of technology equates at not moving at all. And, if you are late, it is difficult to catch up with the opponents that are ahead of you if you don’t start running.

Finland is home of 219 scaleups, about 4% of the total amount that we tracked in Europe. They cumulatively raised $1.9B in funding since inception, which is 2.3% of the total capital raised by European scaleups to date. The Finnish ecosystem is in the ninth position of the European Scaleup Country Index, between the Netherlands and Denmark. If absolute numbers suggest that Finland is really far from UK, Germany, France, and Sweden, the conversation changes in relative terms. Starting this year we introduced two indicators to better understand the efficiency of a scaleup economy as it relates to the size of the country in question.

In 2017, more than 1,200 scaleups were born in Europe and $22B of new capital was invested into scaleups. We’ve measured good progress, but there is still a lot of work ahead of us.

“What’s wrong in Italy? It just moves too slow.”That was the blunt answer of Augusto Marietti during an interview a few years ago. Originally from Rome, Augusto is the CEO and co-founder of Kong (formerly known as Mashape), who just closed a $18 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

There has been no shortage of unicorns or any verticals left untouched by startups coming out of Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Iceland.

34% of European scaleups come from the UK and 35% (30 out of 86) of the European scalers (large tech companies raising over $100M) live across the Channel. Our research confirms that, to date, the UK has been the epicentre of Scaleup Europe.