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In Europe there is a deep West-East and North-South divide, and even large metropolitan areas in Central and Eastern Europe and in Southern Europe are lagging far behind when it comes to the number of scaleups (startups that raised more than one million euro in funding):
- Combined with almost 5,000 scaleups, the Global scaleup cities – London, Paris, Berlin and Stockholm – concentrate 40% of scaleups of the European scaleup cities.
- The Top European scaleup cities i.e., Barcelona, Copenhagen, Dublin, Helsinki, Madrid, Amsterdam, Munich, Cambridge, Manchester, Oxford, and Zurich, together with more than 2,500 scaleups, host a further 20% of European scaleups.
- It is striking in this territorial landscape that the 15 scaleup cities of Central and Eastern Europe – i.e., Prague, Budapest, Tallinn, Vilnius, Gdansk, Poznan, Wroclaw, Cracow, Warsaw, Bucharest, Bratislava, Ljubljana, Riga, Sofia, and Zagreb – offer a total of only 443 scaleups a location which is equal to 3.5% of all European scaleups. Just for comparison, it is above the corresponding values of Dublin (339 scaleups), but below those of Stockholm (489).
- In a similar vein, major capitals in Southern Europe – Rome, Athens and Lisbon – have put together fewer than 130 scaleups, which is in line with the values of Lausanne or Edinburgh.
Figure 1: The number of scaleups across the European scaleup cities, 2021
Source: Cséfalvay, Zoltán and Szombathy, Zoltán (2022) Concertation or Convergence? The role of technological specialisation in the entrepreneurial ecosystems of European cities. Paper presented at the 39th EBES conference, Rome, 6-8 April 2022. Calculation is based on Dealroom data (retrieved 02/06/2021) and OECD FUA classification.
