In the heart of Ghent, a city of 270,000 set in the flat farmlands of East Flanders, a 100-person team works from two glass-walled floors overlooking one of the city’s famed canals.
Behind the glass is a rarity in Europe’s tech landscape: Aikido, a Ghent-founded cybersecurity firm that in January became a billion-dollar company.
As transatlantic relations continue to fray and Europe pursues its quest for tech sovereignty, policymakers are pinning hopes on homegrown tech unicorns — billion-dollar companies like Aikido — to anchor the continent’s digital future.
But founders and analysts who spoke with The Parliament described a different reality. Competitiveness may have become the leitmotif of the European Union, but many companies are nonetheless forced to navigate a thicket of unwieldy European Union and member state laws — causing an exodus of founders instead looking to scale in the more business-friendly United States or the United Arab Emirates.
At the same time, a different vision is taking shape. Rather than mimic Silicon Valley, a growing cohort of industry players are rooting for a European tech ecosystem geared around ethical technology, public-private partnerships and securing Europe’s competitive edge in advanced manufacturing and robotics.
“You see a distinctive moral base from which to start from in Europe, that I would argue that Anglo-Saxon capitalism doesn’t necessarily share,” said Simon Schaefer, the president of Allied for Startups, a group advocating for European startups. “And I don’t think that is in contradiction to scale or growth.”
Becoming European unicorn
Roeland Delrue did stints at banks and tech firms in New York and San Francisco before returning to his native Belgium in 2017. After a few years at a Ghent-based startup, Delrue and some college friends launched Aikido in 2022.
The company’s genesis was the realization that software security was too expensive and complicated for most software developers to manage on their own.
“It turned out that we were not the only ones with that idea or problem, and that the market is actually a lot bigger than we initially anticipated,” said Delrue. Now, the company is seeking to expand globally, with offices in Belgium, San Francisco and London.
Delrue said that scaling is definitely harder in Europe, but added that, ironically, European companies might have a competitive edge at home as American firms would find it much more difficult to manage the European ecosystem than the other way around, creating a sort of protectionism by accident.
But that fragmented system is also the reason why Europe is far behind the U.S. in the total number of unicorns. As of 2025, Europe had 135 tech unicorns compared with 611 in the U.S. San Francisco alone hosted 271 of those.
Europe’s regulatory headwinds
For large and small companies alike, founders who spoke with The Parliament pointed to four main bottlenecks when attempting to scale in Europe: restrictive EU-level digital regulation, differing member state laws, lack of late-stage capital as well as linguistic and cultural barriers across the bloc.
For example, Ohto Pentikäinen, Finnish co-founder of Doublepoint, a gesture-recognition startup founded in 2020, said member states have different taxation laws for company stock options. Offering employees a stake in the company is a common way for startups to attract talent. But for employees living in certain European countries, the stock option may be nearly worthless.
European investors are also more risk-adverse than their American counterparts, Pentikäinen said, adding that while there are EU funding mechanisms, they’re not built for speed. The EIC Accelerator, for instance, requires a lengthy application and evaluation process where applicants have a low chance of success. Instead, European founders often have to turn to the U.S. for later-stage funding — which can also bring pressure to legalize the business in America.
In fact, Europeans creating a new American parent company has become so common it has acquired its own term: the “Delaware flip,” named after the small U.S. state known for its low taxes and favorable business legislation.
“In the United States, the prevailing mindset is ‘I give you capital, and then you show me,’” said Guy Reiffers, a Luxembourg-based founder. “In Europe, it is often the opposite, ‘Prove to me that you don’t need my capital, then I might invest.’”
Another challenge are EU-level regulations like the Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act and the EU AI Act.
Mitchel Volkering runs vaic.at, a Dutch-Brazilian tech company that has developed a number of apps for European consumers, such as mEUvy, which helps users explore and relocate to different cities. Volkering wanted to build his apps on top of AI systems such as Apple Intelligence, but EU regulations such as the interoperability requirements in the DMA blocks access to such technology in Europe until months after it’s available in China or the U.S.
“In that time, my competitors in the U.S. or China or anywhere else will say, ‘Great. Wait six months and then we will deploy before you can even start developing,’” he said.
The tallest hurdle of all, though, might be one that policy can’t tackle — namely Europe’s linguistic and cultural diversity.
Aikido founder Delrue said the dozens of languages and different cultural approaches to business are hard for companies to navigate, often requiring additional hires like local salespeople and lawyers. In contrast, America is a single market with a single language and business culture.
A European vision for tech
Even with so many headwinds, investment levels in European tech have grown more than 10-fold in the past decade, unicorns have tripled, and there are now five European tech companies with a valuation of over $100 billion. Europe’s tech ecosystem also accounted for 15% of GDP in 2025, up from only 4% in 2016.
However, while European founders created 27% of startups globally in 2025, it only amounted to 10% of global sales value — more evidence of founders looking to the U.S. to grow and sell their companies. Currently, the top seven American tech firms are 20 times larger than the top seven European firms, and the U.S. has more than four times as many unicorns.
Despite that, founders and policymakers who spoke with The Parliament weren’t keen on simply mimicking Silicon Valley. America’s hands-off handling of its tech companies have put it at the frontline of innovation and profit, but it has also come with a slew of social costs, including privacy breaches, unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, addictive algorithms steering social media platforms and rising concerns about an artificial intelligence bubble that could wobble the American — and global — economy.
Instead, momentum is building around a European tech ecosystem built around public funding, regulation-guided growth and ethical technology that works for people, not only profits. Rather than regulation being seen solely as a hindrance, several founders said they were interested in building European businesses rooted in human rights, liberal democracy and the well-being of European consumers in mind.
As examples of the distinctly European approach, Schaefer pointed to European resistance to media and algorithmic manipulation on platforms like X, strong safeguards for data protection and European efforts to preemptively regulate problematic uses of technology before they become available to the wider public.
“Right now there’s a whole generation of hyper pro-European young people who want to make tech in Europe work,” said Andreas Klinger, a venture capital investor and co-founder of EU Inc., at the Rebuilding Europe’s Sovereignty Conference in Brussels in January. “This is an energy that so many people aren’t even aware of.”
One event attendee and soon-to-be founder, Adrien Fallou, said that instead of replicating the American startup scene, Europe should lean into what makes it distinctive. Fallou, who worked in tech in the U.S., said that for too long the “Silicon Valley startup has been the thing we should aspire to.”
“Instead, I aspire to build in Europe,” said Fallou, who’s based in Paris. “Maybe the EU model is not as big on venture capital, but is driven more through public-private partnership.”
That’s the model pursued by SPRIN-D, the public-private financing organization of the German government that helps to fund innovative technologies, much like a typical venture capital firm, with the help of public money. The organization has been so successful in supporting startups with public funds that France and the Netherlands are considering launching their own versions.
“We have this agility and execution power and independence,” Patrick Rose, an innovation manager at SPRIN-D, told The Parliament. “There’s so much untapped technology in Europe that nobody is investing in.”
In recent months, the group has run a series of competitions for startups, on topics ranging from non-kinetic ways to shoot down drones, to deepfake detention and prevention, trying to match tech founders with pressing European public needs.
Other founders pointed to Europe leveraging areas of historical strength, such as robotics, research-intensive breakthroughs dubbed “deep-tech” and advanced manufacturing.
Whatever shape European tech takes in the coming decades, one element is clear to the founders and policymakers who spoke with The Parliament — there’s never been more urgency to build a healthy and distinct European tech ecosystem.
“If we don’t take action then in 10 years time we will be preparing for sunset,” said Anna Krzyzanowska, an advisor to Directorate General Research and Innovation at the Commission at the Rebuilding Europe’s Sovereignty Conference. “We have to believe in our own European story.”
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