As the EIB’s TechEU Equity Summit convenes in Luxembourg on 22 September, Europe is testing a new answer to an old problem: promising startups that outgrow the continent’s own capital before they can scale.
A well-known European paradox
Europe does not have a startup problem. It has a scale-up problem. That diagnosis sits at the heart of Mario Draghi’s landmark report on European competitiveness, and it is also the starting point for TechEU, the new EUR 70 billion financing platform launched by the European Investment Bank (EIB) Group. On 22 September, the EIB convenes its TechEU Equity Summit in Luxembourg, bringing investors, fund managers and policymakers together to discuss how the platform is taking shape a year into its rollout.
Europe creates roughly as many startups as the United States but struggles to turn them into scale-ups. Draghi puts a number on the shortfall: closing the venture capital gap would require around EUR 120 billion a year, EUR 80 billion of which for late-stage financing alone. TechEU will not close that gap alone — the EUR 70 billion mobilised by the EIB Group over 2025-2027 is a fraction of the total — but it targets the problem directly: an investment platform covering companies’ entire growth cycle, a stronger supply of growth capital and venture debt, dedicated scale-up and exit tools, and the European Tech Champions Initiative (ETCI) to support very large funds.
The idea is to prevent Europe’s future champions from being forced to seek growth financing outside Europe, a step that often precedes a takeover by non-European players. Draghi also calls for industrial policy more sharply focused on critical technologies: clean tech, digital tech, health and biotech, defence and space tech, and fundamental research and skills.
One platform, not a new pot of money
TechEU is often described, a little too simply, as a bundling exercise: existing EIB and European Investment Fund (EIF) instruments repackaged under one brand. That framing undersells it. TechEU does not introduce fundamentally new instruments, but nor is it merely a rebranding of existing budgets — there is new money on the table, roughly EUR 5 billion a year from the EIB Group alone, plus a reprioritisation of existing budgets toward the platform’s goals.
Over 2025-2027, the EIB Group intends to deploy EUR 70 billion in financing under the TechEU banner, aiming to mobilise around EUR 250 billion in total investment once private and institutional co-investors are factored in. The instrument mix is broad: roughly EUR 40 billion of debt, EUR 20 billion of equity and EUR 10 billion of guarantees.
The bigger novelty is not the size of the numbers but how the capital is assembled. Europe’s problem is not only insufficient public funds, but an inability to attract and channel private savings toward innovative companies — a conclusion Draghi reaches as well. TechEU is designed to pull in the European Commission, the EIB, the EIF, national promotional banks and private investors around a shared set of instruments.
The cost of a fragmented ecosystem
Ask any deep-tech founder in Europe to list the institutions they have dealt with while raising money, and the list can be dizzying: Horizon Europe, the EIC Accelerator, the EIC Fund, InvestEU, EIB venture debt, the EIF, ETCI, the ScaleUp Europe Fund, national agencies, and various guarantee schemes. Each has its own contacts, eligibility criteria, timelines and decision-making methods. This fragmentation creates significant costs for companies and slows their access to financing — many founders end up spending more time navigating the European landscape than developing their company.
TechEU’s answer is a single point of entry: a portal and an “Investment Readiness Checker” that routes a company toward the right instrument, without requiring it to first understand the entire architecture. The goal is not to legally merge every instrument, but to create a single gateway to the EIB Group’s entire financing offer and that of its partners.
Growth capital: the weakest link
If there is one stage in the financing chain that most worries policymakers, it is not seed or Series A — it is growth. The weakest link in Europe’s financing chain is no longer research or seed funding, but scale-up financing: late-stage growth rounds and the financing of capital-intensive deep-tech companies in sectors such as space, biotech, defence and climate.
Europe has a reasonable number of funds that can write a first cheque, but far fewer able to follow up with EUR 100 million to EUR 500 million tickets to carry a company through global expansion. For capital-intensive deep techs, the challenge multiplies: these companies typically need to combine equity, venture debt, guarantees, project financing and industrialisation support all at once.
Without that growth capital, European companies are often pushed toward American or Asian investors for their largest rounds — frequently the first step before a takeover by non-European players.
Direct financing or a friendly intermediary
Not every company approaches TechEU the same way. The model splits roughly along company size and maturity. Startups and innovative SMEs mostly access TechEU indirectly, through venture capital funds backed by the EIF, banks operating under EIF or EIB guarantees, or partner debt and growth-capital funds. The company does not receive money directly from the EIB or the EIF; it raises funds from a VC or borrows from a bank that itself benefits from TechEU support. Within deep tech specifically, the EIC Fund can still step in directly, with tickets of up to EUR 30 million. In addition, the ScaleUp Fund, incepted in 2026, can deploy even bigger tickets (up to EUR 300 million) to the most promising and fast-growing champions.
Scale-ups and emerging tech champions get closer to the source. Once a company reaches a critical size, TechEU offers more direct access to EIB Group resources: venture debt, scale-up debt, project financing, acquisition financing and even certain pre-IPO instruments. Equity tickets can reach up to EUR 150 million through the relevant vehicles, while growth debt targets average amounts of around EUR 75 million per company. TechEU’s real novelty is to hide this complexity behind a single point of entry: a company applies through the platform and is directed to the appropriate instrument, whether direct or intermediated.
Where the EIC Fund ends and TechEU begins
The EIC Fund and TechEU are often mentioned in the same breath, and the boundary between them is deliberately fluid. The EIC Fund — running, in effect, “from technology to company” — backs companies selected under the EIC Accelerator as they cross the gap between early-stage innovation and market traction, typically with tickets from a few million to a few tens of millions of euros. Since 2022, the EIC Fund has committed roughly EUR 2.0 billion to around 370 startups, and is set to continue at that pace through 2027, reaching by then 3.5 billion and around 600 start-ups.
TechEU, by contrast, aims to cover the entire growth journey — “from company to European champion” — providing coherent access to equity, venture debt, guarantees, acquisition financing and exit tools with one explicit goal: keeping globally significant scale-ups in Europe. In short, the EIC Fund identifies future deep-tech gems, and TechEU provides the financial means to help some of them become global leaders.
Making companies investable
One of the more striking shifts in European thinking in recent years is that money is no longer the only, or even the main, obstacle for many European deep-tech companies. Europe already has considerable research output, talent, public support and available capital; the problem often lies in converting these assets into investable projects capable of absorbing significant financing.
For a deep-tech company, raising money increasingly means demonstrating solid intellectual property, a credible regulatory strategy, sound governance and a realistic industrial plan. Many companies spun out of academic research are technologically very strong but less mature on these dimensions. That is why TechEU is built as much around support — through its Investment Readiness Checker and advisory services — as around capital itself.
Four Luxembourg companies already testing the model
Luxembourg’s tech ecosystem faces a familiar bind: a small domestic market and a venture capital scene that remains thinner than in Paris, Berlin, London or Stockholm. TechEU’s pan-European design is meant to help local companies get around that constraint, by giving them access to instruments and investors operating at the scale of the whole Union rather than a single country.
Four Luxembourg-linked companies illustrate what that can look like in practice:
R3 Robotics (formerly Circu Li-ion) raised EUR 20 million in February 2026 to pivot from battery recycling toward dismantling full EV systems, in a round that combined EUR 14 million from private investors including HG Ventures, Suma Capital and Oetker Collection with EUR 6 million from the EIC grant and equity schemes. The Luxembourg-founded company operates dismantling robots from a certified plant in Karlsruhe and plans to double its 45-person team.
Space Cargo Unlimited, based in Foetz, secured EUR 27.5 million in September 2025 — Europe’s largest Series A for in-space manufacturing — backed by Expansion Ventures, Eurazeo, and the Luxembourg Future Fund, itself a collaboration between SNCI and the EIF. The round also comprised EUR 7.5 million from the EIC Fund and a EUR 2.5 million grant from the EIC Accelerator for its BentoBox microgravity research platform.
OQ Technology, a Luxembourg-based operator of a satellite constellation enabling IoT and direct-to-device services, is drawing on both the EIC Fund (for up to EUR 13 million) and the EIB venture debt under the InvestEU programme to fund the launch of more than 20 new satellites.
EnduroSat, a nanosatellite manufacturer headquartered in Luxembourg with R&D operations in Bulgaria, received EIB venture debt in 2021 and has since raised EUR 43 million from investors including Google Ventures, Morphosis capital, Riot Ventures, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and the EIC Fund for EUR 10m, opening a new Luxembourg office and laboratory in 2026 to anchor its European operations.
Selection for TechEU and the EIC Fund is not designed around geography: it is driven first by how innovative a project is and how well it aligns with strategic sectors such as deep tech, digital, biotech, climate, defence and space, rather than by country of origin. Still, the four cases above suggest Luxembourg-based companies are finding real traction within the new architecture.
The remaining gap
Luxembourg has built a strong ecosystem for seeding and early-stage development, but on its own it does not have the depth of capital needed to finance many deep-tech projects through to scale-up. In that sense, it faces the same challenge as the rest of Europe and depends on the broader integration of European capital markets that TechEU is meant to accelerate.
Although Luxembourg does have a track record of recruiting and selling internationally — companies such as SES, Maana Electric and Endurosat show that borders are rarely the constraint they might seem – recent local data reflects the same diagnosis at a European level: Luxinnovation’s 2025/2026 report counts more than 800 startups and scale-ups locally, with a mature network of incubators, but flags growth financing, not seed capital, as the remaining gap — prompting the government’s own “From Seed to Scale” roadmap, launched in 2025.
Strong incubators, a deep financial sector and a recognised legal framework are all in place. What is missing is a pool of locally based growth-equity funds able to write cheques above EUR 50 million. On that point, Luxembourg is little different from the rest of Europe — which is exactly the gap TechEU, and the summit convening this month in the Grand Duchy, is meant to help close.
Key figures
EUR 70bn — EIB Group financing deployed under TechEU, 2025-2027
EUR 250bn — Total investment TechEU aims to mobilise with private and institutional co-investors
EUR 120bn/year — Annual venture capital gap identified by the Draghi report
EUR 150m — Maximum equity ticket available through TechEU’s growth vehicles
EUR 3.5bn — EIC Fund financing committed to around 600 startups, 2022-2027
4 — Luxembourg-linked companies already backed by the EIC Fund
