There is a lot of discussion here trashing EU programs for startups and not a lot of specific details, which is disappointing. I will try to provide a more substantive critique.<p>My personal experience, having been involved with many startups in both the EU and US, is that EU government funding is completely useless for almost all startups. Why? First of all, you have to be part of the existing networks. If your business does not have university affiliations with people that get existing grants, or connections to EU bureaucracy, then you can forget about getting a dime. Then there is the risk aspect: if you are doing anything even remotely novel, or with any amount of risk, forget about it. This is not just my opinion, Mario Draghi, previous president of the ECB and Italian PM, said that the EU does not take enough risk to produce real innovation. And finally there's the timelines: from researching funding to cash in your bank account is always measured in years.<p>So, my expectation is that these funds will be distributed to members of the bureaucratic class and their network, for low-risk, low-reward projects, on a timescale too slow for most startups. I hope to be proven wrong, but the results of previous decades of EU funding programs do not make me optimistic.
From a person who has dealt with the management of European research projects: these funds will go through the EU bureaucratic maze, don't even think they will be available directly to startups. There will probably be programs and sub-programs, projects and other craps like that to more difficult for people to access the money. It's how the EU works. That's why startups flee to US if they want serious financing.<p>So leave me be very skeptical about this news.
Why not finance a more wide tax break for tech companies, including small companies?<p>I have seen first hand, one of my classmates from high-school, whom I didn't consider to be too bright, receive a 100k EUR grant to build an esports platform that ended up being a styled-up wordpress blog. He had zero interest in tech, never programmed, the works...<p>He had no interest nor knowledge relating to tech, but managed to somehow get that grant. Meanwhile, I was paying taxes on hard earned freelancing dev money. We were both 23 years old at the time and it was really jarring.<p>I'd rather they cut taxes for already profitable small companies. The taxes in EU are astronomic.
Calviño is the wrong choice to lead this. Why not tap a few people from Mistral if they care about AI? Spotify if they care about more generic tech?<p>Funding will not fix the fact that euro salaries are not even remotely competitive especially after tax. Maybe it’s better to be poor in europe than America but MLEs at large AI labs and bigtech SWEs are definitively not.<p>Plus, capital is somehow still more risk-averse in the EU despite the ECB's policy rate consistently running >200bps lower than fed funds. And of course the process of getting funds from the EIB remains agonizing even with this change.
These initiatives always end up the same way: bureaucrats distributing taxpayer money to the socially focused careerists at the top of large companies and academic institutions (perhaps after they’ve left and founded a startup). It’s just so engrained in the European way of thinking that you need to ”be someone”, not ”understand something” or ”be able to do something”. It’s sad, but that’s how it is.
It's really tiring to see the same handful of arguments on HN every time anything related to Europe or the EU is posted on here. Yes, some things the USA is doing better than Europe, but far from everything and depending on your political leanings (or rather social position) even most.
“The bank aims to process startup financing applications within six months, significantly improving from the current 18-month timespan.”<p>Oof.<p>The right way to do this would have been to match private financing so the EIB is providing capital but not gatekeeping. (That or commit to giving the first N companies to reach some milestone a bunch of cheap capital.)
Europe is going to have a hang-over from resting on it's laurels for the past 20-30 years. I don't know if people will be able to tolerate the changes needed to totally stand independent.<p>If Europe wants to copy the powerhouse tech industry of the US, it's going to have to become more like the US.
I was happy to read this as a founder who was raised in the UK. I wish I didn't have to move to the US to start a company but it's starting to feel like a joke here.<p>> The bank aims to process startup financing applications within six months<p>No good founder is waiting for 6 months. It makes absolutely no sense when VCs can make decisions in days, hours even.
From my personal experience this funds most of the time end up being absorbed by big corporations that had the contacts and the bureaucratic muscle. So basically it's throwing away 70B euros of citizen taxes.
If anyone is in the US and interested in coming over to Europe to build a startup…<p>I started an incubator specifically for US based entrepreneurs looking to make the leap from what is, right now, an incredibly unstable place to build, and assist in getting both private and public funding for you, and take care of all the admin and immigration paperwork.<p>Come to Brussels, Belgium. It’s the most international city in the world per capita, English friendly, welcoming to expats and there’s 0% capital gains tax. It’s also human sized, you don’t need a car to get around.<p><a href="https://sevenseed.eu/program" rel="nofollow">https://sevenseed.eu/program</a><p>Shoot me an email if you’re interested. This program was birthed right here on HN in a Who’s hiring thread. I’ve talked to 50+ founders who have had enough of the current admin and want change.
It's unclear to me if Europe can move any faster than they can boot strap a VC culture. They can only grow a cadre of VC partners through experience. Some American firms have branches in Europe, and there are some European VCs that have decent scale, but I would guess it's 1/4th the size of the US venture business. Maybe less if you factor out investment that doesn't really look like US venture investment. European institutions should step up in the role of limiteds.<p>The article doesn't give a lot of details, but the ones it does aren't inspiring confidence. A six month decision process is wildly incompatible with startup needs. EIB might be better off being limited partners in existing European VCs.
investment is one piece of the puzzle - but you need talent, reasonable cost of living, and a fiscal climate that rewards success instead of sucking any sliver of it with onerous taxes. All those factors of course vary throughout the EU but it would be nice if they took a more holistic approach to supporting tech ventures.
The folks who allowed the continent to fall behind through over-regulation would like you to know they'll now do a good job at being the capital allocators.
Look, 6 months is better than 18 but it drives the type of startup you’re likely to get. Anyone trying to move fast just can’t participate. They’re forced to go elsewhere. You can only deal with organisations that can survive and plan for 6 months. What do they do in the meantime? Build? Wait? Especially in AI, the world is moving so fast that you need to make decisions within days, not half a year. How many frontier models and innovations arrive in half a year, while this lot think about the now-outdated proposal?<p>All you’ll get are sluggish companies designed to suck up the funds. I used to work for such a company. The business model seemed to be whatever would fund hours of researchers time, and travel money for those smart enough to write papers for whatever conference was in a country they hadn’t visited yet. Targeting EU funds was top priority and they could do it by creating some arbitrary “consortium” that generated enough credibility with adjudicators. I hated the waste and the lack of actual goals.
As with Germany’s 1€ trillion new credit, of which half goes to the military, so will the EIB ‘inject’ more than half of it into the military.
Large established tech companies will get a big part and quantum startups will see their expected cash flow.
Good timing for those quantum start ups which have been popping up through the whole EU recently.
When it comes to European tech funding, I'm a big fan of NL Net's Next Generation Internet (NGI) grants[0]. These grants the only kind of investment I care about and the only kind I want to see. My opinion towards this is influenced by the enshittification[1] that has unfortunately been embraced by large tech companies and financial powers in the United States. Overall I'm not confident this is actually good news, but the fact that the financing is also available to researchers seems like a possible silver lining.<p>[0] <a href="https://nlnet.nl/commonsfund/" rel="nofollow">https://nlnet.nl/commonsfund/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification</a>
I don't understand why people in the comment seem to obsess with “bureaucracy” and “taxpayers money”. The EIB is, as the name says: a <i>bank</i>. It has some strategic targeting running, but the way it works is through making loans. The EIB is making <i>profits</i> with its investment activity!
What does “inject” mean here? Iirc, Israel did something similar a while back and boosted a ton of startup early on, but they quickly died off and they realized you need the scrutiny from free market VCs to create competition.<p>for a lot of startups
They should start funding Mozilla, imho. EU's stance in consumer protection is a great match. Plus it is strategically smart to have a browser under your own control.
I am in the process of moving my startup from Canada to Germany. I started in India, so I have experience running a bootstrapped business on three continents. I am not looking for funding, and in fact use the business profits to invest in other companies.<p>Dealing with German bureaucracy is the hardest thing I have done in my life, perhaps second only to bootstrapping my business. Bureaucracy isn't a side effect of poor planning; it's tool to control individual liberties and capital, without going full communist.<p>For the first time, I am considering selling my business. I want Europe to succeed, but I see no way how. Any little faith I have in EU actually resides in a handful of underdogs like Estonia and Poland.<p>Most of that €70B is going in the pockets of bureaucrats and consultants, assuming any startup sees a dime within 3 years.
Great idea and I think they should 10x it, but... the person in charge according to the article is EIB President Nadia Calviño. She is a Spanish career politician and a socialist lawyer with background in media and broadcasting. They rarely put in charge experienced people or at least engineers. It's so sad to see the EU crumble due to a cast of career bureaucrats squeezing it to its last drop. There are so many great universities and researchers to build things.
Good for EU for trying to improve tech market, but I recall seeing another thread here at HN why it can't be solved by simply throwing money at it.
I wonder what percentage of that money would be spent on just complying with various regulations.<p>Then it would be interesting to see this % comparison with US and China. Could be strongly correlated with ROI.
This will be a transfer of money to existing big corp on BS projects that go nowhere. How about they just use the money as a cheap credit pool for VC's one a 1:1 match for private investments and maybe they can even make money from this.<p>The person in charge is not fit to run a small coffee shop much less a 70B fund.
The US has a start-up culture heavily centered around venture capitalist investments. The EU is currently trying to <i>be</i> the venture capitalist and to create a European start-up culture where none was before.<p>I think this is a terrible idea, because it does not address why there is no European startup culture. Europe has tech talent and Europe has money, yet it has no start-up culture. There are many reasons for this. To me the most important ones are:<p>- Many EU member states have very start-up hostile labor laws. In Germany many tactics/offerings US startups use to hire talent are illegal.<p>- The wage difference between hard work at a startup, less hard work at a large corporation and very low stress work in a government office is minimal. Working for a startup is almost never financially rewarding.<p>- The mainstream social democrat conception of work, which much of the population shares, is totally at odds with American start-up culture.<p>Money does not solve any of these problems, because it does not answer the single most important question. Who is going to do anything with this, that is actually worthwhile. I have seen dozens of these EU funded projects and as a tech enthusiast I think many of them are exciting and cool and fun and interesting. The number of actual useful products I have seen is at zero.
Imagine if AI does become so powerful UBI is a necessity. How would europe be able to pay for UBI without money coming in and taxes being paid to fund it? Things like this seem critical for the future of the EU and yet I'm super sceptical this will lead to openai etc level quality.
If you want to start something in tech- you got to eastern europe in europe.
Everywhere else, established industries and clubs will leach all the motion from you. But in poland, the baltics, Finland -you somehow can start things and its still reasonable easy to set things in motion.
And there is nobody there to stop you.
> Drawing on the current geopolitical landscape, Calviño sees the uncertainty generated by US President Donald Trump's economic policies as an opportunity for Europe.<p>The opportunity of wasting the hard earned money of the citizens she means.<p>Have they considered doing useful stuff like removing regulations, lowering taxes, fixing the immigration mess, etc? You know, what actually made America an innovation hub.<p>This will end the same way it always does every time the EU gives away money to economic sectors they are jealous that the US have and they don’t: a select few will fill their pockets with nothing to show for it.