Across the continent and across the tech sector, June 1 unequivocally marks the start of events month.
Now, alongside SXSW London, London Tech Week, Founders Forum, VivaTech, Sommarminglet (the list goes on), it also marks the start of ‘Built In Europe’.
Balderton Capital, a VC fund that solely backs European founders, is launching ‘Built in Europe’ in collaboration with more than 100 founders and CEOs to celebrate the achievements of European tech startups.
The campaign is championing the continent’s technology sector — from big names like Revolut, Wayve, Lovable and ElevenLabs to those just getting started on the startup journey.
Suranga Chandratillake, Partner at Balderton, told Pathfounders the impetus for launching the campaign was really straightforward, based on an observation the team made towards the end of last year.
A lot of people in the European tech ecosystem, he said, focus on what could be improved and the barriers that might halt success, rather than all the wins that have happened and all the components that are already in place — great universities, great talent etc — that could lead to further success.
“We just thought it was high time that we celebrate some of that,” he said, “And it’s really that simple.”
Over the course of its 25 year history, the last two and a half years have been Balderton’s most successful period.
The European tech ecosystem as a whole, which is now worth $4trillion, has seen similar successes.
Built in Europe / Balderton
So why now?
“There has never been a better time to build from Europe than now,” Anton Osika, co-founder of Lovable, said. “The talent is here, the capital is here, the ecosystem is here. And we have the ambition to match."
Chandratillake started at Balderton 12 years ago when the European tech ecosystem was, as he puts it, “in that potential space”.
“There were a lot of the ingredients, it felt really good. A lot of people were starting companies but we hadn’t really proven it yet,” he says. “We had a few one-offs, whether it was Skype or Business Objects or Arm or Spotify, but they felt very one-off at that stage. Fast forwarding 10, 12, years to where we are today, it feels really real.”
“There are genuine winners out there,” he says, in cities across Europe, and that’s exactly where the campaign will be held.
The out-of-home campaign is running across five leading tech hubs with banners, billboards and digital advertising vans in London, specifically in Old Street — once dubbed “Silicon Roundabout” in a nod to the West Coast’s tech centre that shall not be named near a campaign focused on Europe — in Station F in Paris, on a digital billboard in the heart of Stockholm, in Munich and in Berlin.
The campaign is specifically set to coincide with a number of major startup conferences and events over the course of the month.
Alongside the launch will be a website launch, and the aim is for it to become the go-to place for people to search for jobs within the European tech ecosystem, aggregating open roles across 1,000 tech startups.
The site will also list available local resources to help get more people into tech companies, whether that’s joining existing ones or founding their own.
“If you think about what’s going to matter in the next 100 years, it’s the really hard, deep technology, and startups are where that’s built,” Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall said. “It’s the most adventurous, exciting thing you could do — build or join a startup in Europe.”
The tech sector is the fastest growing sector in the European economy, making up 15% of European GDP across nearly 40,000 funded companies, up from 13,000 a decade ago. According to Atomico’s State of European Tech report, founder optimism is at a ten year high, with 42% of entrepreneurs saying it is more attractive to build in Europe now than a year ago.
“Hopefully you can be part of it, either as an instigator or as a team member,” Chandratillake says. “And we'll track those metrics, we'll see how many people are going through it, we'll see the click throughs, we'll see the engagement, but really it doesn't matter, we just want to celebrate what's already been achieved. I think we owe it to the ecosystem to do that and then, hopefully, support it in only continuing to grow.”
The hope is to bring other firms and even more startups and scale-ups on board — so far more than 100 including Synthesia, Mistral AI, Cleo, GoCardless and Zoe have already got involved.
“It has to be something that the whole ecosystem feels good about and agrees with,” Chandratillake says. “We think they will.”
