17.3B is 3.5X the previous size from 2024 - huge increase, acknowledging that funding risk → startups → society progress is a way forward for staying relevant in the macro.

17.3B is also 35% of last year spend on startups equity funding in Europe ($43B excl. UK), with 40% of it already public money.

17.3B basically flips the European venture landscape from private-led to majority public-funded i.e. public funds would account for 57.2% of the total VC spend in Europe (ex-UK), while private money would shrink in relative terms from 60% to 42.8% of the total.

another way of putting it - $3 of each $5 the VCs spend is coming from our taxes.

that’s before the dilution starts, as the EU has already acknowledged the need to attract new institutional investors (see also the Brits below) - such as pension funds, insurance companies, and commercial banks - to move beyond a purely state-backed model.

the fund-of-funds model involves providing roughly 10-25% of a VC fund's total size as an anchor, while the remaining 75-90% of those funds must be raised from private sources (LPs) to reach the fund's closing target

specifically, the stated objective is to use this capital to mobilise €80 billion in investments - this means for every €1 of capital raised by the ETCI platform, the EIF expects to trigger over €5 in total downstream investment through the mega-funds it anchors. That’s a goal, right now we’re at the 3:5 ratio from above.

does Europe have 100 mid-sized and mega funds though? I am sure we can scramble a few beyond the 10-ish existing candidates, after all Linkedin is full of wannabe experts in everything. The reality of it though is that most of the money managers in Europe are just as performant as the EU people since their results are correlated - the EU doesn’t optimise for maximizing returns but for giving people jobs, meaning VCs exist in the market not because they’re competent, but because of subsidies.

moving on the value chain, does Europe have enough startups able to further put this money to work and create taxable value? Moreso, do we have enough local customers to make the economics of the said value work, given that such scale requires a major American customer portfolio?

it’s a complex long term game, all in all, it’s a good directional move, any marketplace problem starts with solving for liquidity on the supply side, and this is the EU doing it.

The Brits have made it easier for pension funds to back high-growth UK venture.

The EU has been hacked via the Commission's AWS account.

Mastercard is in the market to sell Nets from Denmark, for which it’d paid $3.2B in 2019, now at $370M in sales. Fwiw, in the past couple of years, the Americans have spent 4.3B for purchasing a Swedish (Recorded Future) and a British company (BVNK)

Bending Spoon bought pet tracking company Tractive, in a deal dubbed the largest exit in the Austrian startup history.

The Economist Group was traded at £1.1 billion this week - they make profitably £368.5 million a year (up 2% year-on-year).

Penguin Random House, the Bertelsmann-owned book publisher, had 2025 annual revenue of €5B (flat YoY) with €704M in EBITDA (-5%).

Isar Aerospace is in talks to raise €250M at €2B.

VW invested $1B into Rivian, $750M of which in equity, will do a car JV whereas the Americans put the software and the Germans the iron.

ElevenLabs will open an office in France.

Speedinvest is laying off 10% of their personnel (80 people, 20 partners).

The new mayor of Paris wants to build a second Station F.

The current London mayor also has a plan, launched a finance hub for the 981k local SMEs (fun fact: last year 0.1% of those raised VC funding).

Gladiator and Spartan tomorrow in London, if you’re in defense.

Good tool for the EU AI Act compliance.

Good interview with with ex/ UK Foreign Secretary.

Granola raised C at $1.5B.

Kandou raised 225M at 400M - tomorrow’s intel will cover why this is a strategic deal for the Euro ecosystem, the anti-Nvidia alliances and heterogeneous computing in Europe. Sign up for it.

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