EIF’s incoming chief says Europe’s Tech Champions funds hold 15 unicorns

Europe must give its startups the capital to grow without leaving the continent, Jean-Christophe Laloux said. The incoming chief executive of the European Investment Fund spoke at Wave by Vento in Turin on Friday.

“It’s not enough to innovate in Europe. You also must be able to scale in Europe. And that is really important on the notion of sovereignty,” Laloux said.

Sovereignty does not mean protectionism or isolationism, he said. It means offering European alternatives where things really matter, from critical raw materials to cyber resilience.

Laloux is director general for EU lending and advisory operations at the European Investment Bank. He takes over the EIF, the bank group’s venture arm, on 1 January, the EIF said in July. Ian King of The Times interviewed him.

The bottleneck has moved from early-stage innovation to scaling up, Laloux said. That is the growth stage, from Series B to C.

The European Tech Champions Initiative was set up to close that gap, he said. It is a fund of funds of nearly €4bn, backed by six member states and the EIB Group. It invests in venture funds of about €1bn. Funds that size can write bigger cheques, so companies that have raised Series A and B can grow faster and stay in Europe. At the same event, Vittorio Colao told reporters that Europe needs a single capital market .

The initiative has backed 12 funds, he said, nearly three times the number of €1bn funds in Europe five years ago. Those funds already hold 15 European unicorns.

Laloux expects to announce a second version in November. It will also back funds of €300m to €500m, because not every ecosystem has funds that reach €1bn. It will add a platform for institutional and private investors to co-invest alongside the funds.

Italy put €150m into the initiative. The funds it backs have invested nearly €600m in seven Italian companies, three of them with international partners, Laloux said. That shows international investors find the Italian ecosystem interesting, he said.

The EIB Group also lends to startups through venture debt, he said. It has no repayment for at least five years, and instead of high interest, the lender takes warrants or similar rewards tied to the company’s success. The group also structures the equity side of the European Innovation Council’s funding for early-stage startups.

Deep tech in Europe has grown from about €1tn in valuation five years ago to €4tn, faster than any other part of the economy, Laloux said. He named climate, security and defence, space and biotech. Funds that received EIB Group money backed Isar Aerospace, he said, whose Spectrum rocket launched from Norway.

Security and defence, including cybersecurity, is where capital and valuations have grown most in the past year, he said. The EIF will focus on four areas where Europe still leads: AI, health and biotech, security and defence, and cleantech.

On AI, Europe cannot afford to be left out, because it can lift productivity, he said. Europe must neither leave AI unregulated nor smother it with rules. The EIB has earmarked €3bn for the EU’s AI gigafactories , he said.