Christoph Klink, GP at Antler: Europe's funding gap is also its biggest opportunity

Yeah, I mean, this is like a super interesting report.

Data here that I don't think people would assume, but it's telling the tale of almost two things going on in European tech.

We're seeing this amazing growth, more unicorns, better companies.

We're seeing companies really winning.

But there's also some strange stuff going on at the early stage.

I guess, can you give me the headline and maybe some of the key points from it?

Sure.

So I think, as you said, there's really two things going on right now.

And it feels like these extremes are getting more accentuated right now.

The one side is the one that, fortunately, we all speak about quite a bit, because we all have to be optimists in the line of work that we're in.

And that is, there's more founders building, they are more experienced, they're more technically skilled, they're building bigger companies, all of a sudden, there's 13 decacorns in Europe.

All of a sudden, there's a new branch of unicorns after kind of that 2022, 2023 slump.

And they're scaling faster, they're raising a lot more money, and they are attracting the best investors in the world.

So when you look at the Midas list, the share of them coming to back European companies at a very, very early stage is almost shooting through the roof.

And I think that's very, very, very positive.

And that's great.

There's still a lot of work that we need to do.

And I think we as Europeans, we're not always as optimistic as we should be.

So we speak a lot about that work that needs to be done.

But I think overall, we're on a great path.

However,

there's

a flip side to all that where I think there's less attention being put on right now.

And when you look into the earlier stages of building, then we see a bit of what we call a funding gap emerging because the number of companies being started and the number of founders starting new companies is shooting through the roof.

It has been increasing pretty steadily after 2020. the last peak of 2020.

Yeah, I mean, this is like a super interesting report.

Data here that I don't think people would assume, but it's telling the tale of almost two things going on in European tech.

We're seeing this amazing growth, more unicorns, better companies.

We're seeing companies really winning.

But there's also some strange stuff going on at the early stage.

I guess, can you give me the headline and maybe some of the key points from it?

Sure.

So I think, as you said, there's really two things going on right now.

And it feels like these extremes are getting more accentuated right now.

The one side is the one that, fortunately, we all speak about quite a bit, because we all have to be optimists in the line of work that we're in.

And that is, there's more founders building, they are more experienced, they're more technically skilled, they're building bigger companies, all of a sudden, there's 13 decacorns in Europe.

All of a sudden, there's a new branch of unicorns after kind of that 2022, 2023 slump.

And they're scaling faster, they're raising a lot more money, and they are attracting the best investors in the world.

So when you look at the Midas list, the share of them coming to back European companies at a very, very early stage is almost shooting through the roof.

And I think that's very, very, very positive.

And that's great.

There's still a lot of work that we need to do.

And I think we as Europeans, we're not always as optimistic as we should be.

So we speak a lot about that work that needs to be done.

But I think overall, we're on a great path.

However,

there's

a flip side to all that where I think there's less attention being put on right now.

And when you look into the earlier stages of building, then we see a bit of what we call a funding gap emerging because the number of companies being started and the number of founders starting new companies is shooting through the roof.

It has been increasing pretty steadily after 2020. the last peak of 2020.