‘Deep Tech’ Dominates Plateauing European Venture Capital
- Foreign acquirers seeding Europe’s burgeoning startup hubs
- Europe still struggles to fill late-stage funding gap
For years, the rap on Europe’s technology scene was that it was dominated by consumer-oriented e-commerce companies, some of which were blatant knock-offs of successful U.S. businesses, while the real pioneering innovation was taking place back in Silicon Valley.
That is no longer the case, London-based venture capital firm Atomico says in its latest annual report on the state of European tech. Startups focusing on deep technology -- which would encompass the kind of artificial intelligence developed by Google’s DeepMind, or typing prediction from Microsoft-acquired SwiftKey -- are drawing an increasing share of European venture funding. Deep tech accounted for $1.3 billion of European venture investments in 2015 and an estimated $935 million this year, up from just $289 million in 2011, Atomico said in its report, which was jointly commissioned and released in conjunction with the Slush technology conference in Helsinki, Finland.