This article is a recap of the Growth Forum’s four panels, with the key implications for European scale-ups — and for the policymakers, investors and corporates who shape their path to market.

Europe is not short of ideas. The Growth Forum discussions argued that the bigger constraint is misalignment: scarce late-stage capital, fragmented rules, procurement that is hard to access, and partnerships that stay stuck in ‘pilot mode’. Each adds friction at the moment scale-ups need speed.

Across four panels — focusing on deep tech policy gaps, EIC Scaling Club best practices, scaling barriers in regulation and talent, and the growth-capital gap — one theme stood out. Europe will build more global category leaders when incentives, rules and relationships align around commercial outcomes: clearer routes to customers, clearer routes to investment, and stronger routes to industrial deployment.

Europe’s deep tech scale-ups: Policy actions to bridge financing, procurement and collaboration gaps

The deep tech panel brought together three connected gaps: shortages of late-stage capital (the EU attracting nearly nine times less venture capital per worker than the US), limited innovation-oriented public procurement (despite public procurement representing around 16% of EU gross domestic product) and a 69% failure rate in corporate–scale-up collaborations.

Speakers (Alizée Blanchin, Hello Tomorrow;
Maria Victoria Hernández-Valcárcel, EIC/EISMEA; Agnieszka Stasiakowska, EIC BAS and moderator Josemaria Siota, IESE Business School) framed these as system issues: if buyers, funders and partners move at different speeds, even strong technologies struggle to scale.

A repeated point was translation. Deep tech gains traction when it is expressed in business terms — revenue growth, cost base and competitiveness — and when corporates treat collaboration as strategy rather than a sequence of pilots. The panel also pointed to the value of structured corporate engagement and demand-side tools, including innovation procurement and support such as EIC Business Acceleration Services (BAS).

Takeaways

• Make business value explicit. Pilots progress when impact is as clear as the technology.
• Treat procurement as a growth channel, not a compliance exercise. Innovation-friendly criteria can shorten time to market.
• Corporate collaboration works when expectations, timelines and incentives are aligned — and decisions reach board level.
• Fixes should connect demand, capital and partnerships, not build separate tracks for each.
  
  

Scaling Club best practices: Align founders, investors, mentors and industry

The best-practices session focused on what has worked inside the EIC Scaling Club. Speakers (Josemaria Siota, IESE Business School;
Yann Marteil, Shift4Good;
Nadia Serina, STMicroelectronics;
Mariano García Orgiles, PLD Space and moderator Teresa Cunha, EIC Scaling Club) emphasised the shift from building startups to scaling companies into global players — with stronger governance, sharper market positioning and access to significant capital and industrial partnerships.

They highlighted close interaction between founders, investors and mentors, plus structured access to industrial partners and peer learning. For capital-intensive sectors such as space, advanced manufacturing and deep tech, the combination of long-term investor commitment and strategic corporate partners was presented as decisive. The discussion also stressed bridging national and European support to unlock cross-border opportunities.

As Mariano García Orgiles, Investor Relations Lead at PLD Space, said:

“The support from the EIC Scaling Club has been amazing and helped us be part of the European deep tech conversation by receiving exposure and recognition.”

Takeaways

• Build scaling readiness early: governance, board composition and operational focus quickly become growth constraints.
• Industrial partnerships accelerate validation and deployment when there is a shared language and clear fit.
• Capital-intensive sectors need patient capital and partners who stay the course to industrial maturity.
• Cross-border networks and peer learning turn experience into repeatable practice.
  
  

Scaling Europe: Best practices to align regulation, talent and culture to remove friction

The panel on regulatory, talent and culture barriers was direct about the day-to-day cost of fragmentation. Inconsistent requirements between Member States, lengthy certification processes and a lack of harmonised standards slow cross-border expansion and increase costs.

Speakers (Vit Horky, United Founders VC;
Egle Markeviciute, ESNA Advisor Board Member;
Lucas Maurice, Hello Tomorrow;
Mali M Baum, WLOUNGE, EIC Ambassador and moderator André Barbosa, EurA) argued for EU-level simplification and alignment as a practical lever for growth.

Public procurement surfaced again as a market-access barrier when frameworks favour incumbents and are hard for startups and scale-ups to enter. The discussion also broadened to talent and mindset: Europe needs stronger pipelines, mobility and retention — and a scale-up culture that matches global competition in ambition and risk tolerance. Community and networks were flagged as practical ways to help companies overcome barriers.

Egle Markeviciute, ESNA Advisor Board Member; Former Deputy Minister, Ministry of Economy and Innovation of Lithuania, noted:

“For many member-states, public procurement can be unreachable for startups that need it. That’s why more simplified rules harmonised across the EU could make a difference. Continuous dialogue within the EU and its member-states on how to make things easier for European startups, scaleups and unicorns, to keep competitiveness inside Europe but also globally.”

Takeaways

• Regulatory alignment is a growth policy: less fragmentation means faster scaling across borders.
• Procurement reform builds markets by widening access to public contracts for innovative firms.
• Talent mobility and retention are as strategic as funding for Europe’s competitiveness.
• Culture and community matter: resilience, ambition and peer support help firms move faster.
  
  

Europe’s missed opportunity: Fixing the growth-capital gap

The growth-capital panel returned to a familiar European bottleneck: late-stage rounds are smaller, scarcer and slower than in the US, pushing founders to look abroad when ambition meets scale. Speakers (Marie Nicod, Jolt Capital;
Michel Kurek, Multiverse Computing;
Fabrizio Del Maffeo, Axelera AI;
Jérôme Hervé, Euronext;
Jesper Lilledal, EIFO;
Jean-David Malo, DG Research & Innovation (European Commission) and moderator Shiva Dustdar, EIB) framed this as a market-structure issue rather than an early-stage pipeline problem.

A major focus was the underutilised role of long-term institutional investors — including pension funds and endowments (a $210B opportunity if they matched US exposure) — alongside the need for more integrated, liquid European capital markets and stronger exit options, including initial public offerings and secondary markets. Public instruments, including initiatives such as the €5B EU Scale-Up Fund, were seen as important signals and catalysts, but not substitutes for deeper private participation.

Marie Nicod, General Partner at Jolt Capital, underlined the discipline needed alongside funding:

“There are many great companies with strong innovations, so engineering and methodology also need to accompany the process and remain rigorous in order to create added value.”

Takeaways

• Europe needs late-stage depth to keep global scale-ups anchored and growing in Europe.
• Mobilising institutional capital requires incentives and structures that support long-term equity allocation.
• More liquid, integrated capital markets strengthen exits and reinforce the scale-up journey.
• Public funding is most effective when it crowds in private capital through blended finance and risk-sharing.
  
  

Progress comes from connecting the pieces

The four panels reached different entry points — financing, procurement, corporate partnerships, regulation, talent and capital markets — but the lesson was consistent. Scaling is a systems challenge. Europe’s technologies and founders move faster when the ecosystem aligns around outcomes that buyers can adopt, investors can underwrite and regulators can support across borders. The Growth Forum’s message was practical: progress comes from connecting the pieces, not optimising them in isolation.

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120 European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120 European deep tech companies have been carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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