Europe’s AI future depends on getting the balance right. The European Commission’s Digital Omnibus on AI is a step towards simpler, more innovation-friendly rules, but more work is needed.

⚛️ "There is a strong feeling that while Europe missed the boat on so many tech revolutions of recent years... things could be different this time." Why Europe has a shot: → World-class physics talent → No legacy tech disadvantage → European firms lead on cost efficiency www.bbc.com/news/articl...

Last week OpenAI announced pausing its UK Stargate project, citing high energy costs and regulations that make it hard to build. This will put a dent in the UK's AI ambitions, which have otherwise attracted more than £100 billion in private investment since Starmer became the British Prime Minister.

Ukrainian Sky Fall took first place in the Pentagon's Drone Dominance selection. Its Shrike Fiber drone ranked first in long-range performance and second in urban strike tests, scoring 99.3 out of 100 European sovereignty starts with leading European defense tech kyivindependent.com/ukraines-sh...

Should European start-up founders feel such resistance from Brussels policymakers? DutchBasecamp is running an anonymous survey to get people's opinions of EU regulation. Have your say! survey.ogni.im/

Investors are alarmed by speculation that CEO Cingolani of Italian defense group Leonardo would not be re-appointed. At a time when European defense companies are more important than ever, and coming despite Cingolani's successful tenure, the move is a surprise. www.ft.com/content/fd9...

Are you Europemaxxing? A lot of people online take a pessimistic view of Europe's future. It doesn't help that many Europeans are naturally humble and prefer to avoid self-promotion. But things are really good here and even US investors recognise it 🇪🇺 www.ft.com/content/2d6...

A coalition of European tech companies is launching a competitor to Microsoft's office suite: documents, spreadsheets, and slides. European startups will now have more choice for their enterprise software needs! 🇪🇺 🖥️ 💾 www.techradar.com/pro/watch-o...

Europe needs more innovators like TAF Founder Yakovenko, and more humility from legacy industry vets who have a lot to learn about modern industrial capability, innovative speed, iteration, and efficiency. The wars of today are being won on new metrics! theprint.in/defence/mor...

Europe is falling dangerously behind in AI compared to the US. The US already has a lead in AI deployment at the workplace, European countries still need to catch up. We need better pro-AI policies if Europe wants a chance in the AI age.

Europe is driving competition in silicon! Oxford born Fractile is raising at a $1bn valuation, backed by former Intel chief Gelsinger and VC Accel. Fractile's innovation? SRAM that improves the speed and cost of AI inference. Upwards! 🇬🇧🚀📈 www.ft.com/content/075...

🚧 "Europe remains a patchwork of distinct regulations and business cultures rather than a single, frictionless market. Many firms hit a domestic ceiling". That's from Inflexion's Flor Kassai. EU plans to deepen the single market (incl. 'EU Inc') can't come soon enough 📈 www.ft.com/content/a68...

💶 How can the EU channel more of its capital into innovative firms? 1️⃣ Reform pension systems with larger funded components 2️⃣ Redesign tax systems to favour productive investments 3️⃣ Simplify capital market regulation to reduce the cost of raising equity encompass-europe.com/comment/eur...

🏗️ Mistral AI continues to be one of Europe's biggest builders. The AI firm has raised over €700 million to build a new data centre near Paris, a result of surging demand from governments, enterprises, and research institutions. techcrunch.com/2026/03/30/...

Reasons to be cheerful about European Tech: AI funding is at all-time high 📈

💶 HUGE NEWS: The European Investment Bank Group announced last week it will massively expand its European Tech Champions Initiative 📈 This second phase pledges a further €15 billion, and aims to mobilise €80 billion in investments 🔥 More here: www.eif.org/press/all/e...

🇪🇺 Over twice as many (133 million) Europeans use LLMs than Americans (61 million) Here in Europe, we are more enthusiastic about AI. Our policymakers should recognise and leverage, not discourage, this advantage 💪 From Prosus' State of AI Europe: www.prosus.com/state-of-ai...

🛡️🚀 Defence Tech is emerging as Europe's faster-growing sector. Europe is set to spend nearly €1 TRILLION by 2030, with innovations likely to benefit consumers, too. (From Dealroom: content.dealroom.co/uploaded/20...)

The best AI minds are now more than ever deciding to head to the Old Continent 🇪🇺🚀

"Silicon Canals", "New Palo Alto", "Alpine Tech Cluster"? Tech ecosystems are critical to faster R&D, scaling workforces, and self-dependency. Here's where VC-backed deep tech is clustered in Europe 👇 (from Dealroom's European Deep Tech report: content.dealroom.co/uploaded/20...)

Would Europe benefit from importing more AI talent? Europe hosts 67k extra-European AI talent, compared to the US hosting 149k extra-American AI talent From Prosus' State of AI in Europe

Not all unicorns keen their horns. Might Nine's report reveals 30% of Europe's startups previous valued over $1 billion last year lost their 'unicorn' status: mightynine.co/state-of-th... But it's not all bad news: the top performers could more than compensate for the value gap

Is Europe's startup capital too concentrated? Nearly two-thirds of capital raised by startups valued > $1 billion comes from just three countries (🇬🇧, 🇫🇷, 🇩🇪) and around half funds two sectors: Fintech and B2B SaaS. newsletter.dealroom.co/has-europe-...

🇳🇱 🦄 B2B agentic AI platform Wonderful hit a €1.7 billion valuation this month, becoming the latest European unicorn. Wonderful's platform deploys AI agents in customer-facing and internal workflows, reducing handling times by up to 60% 🚀 www.wonderful.ai/blog-articl...

🇪🇺 "We have to think European, because it’s obvious that even the largest European nations, on their own, are irrelevant.” Javier Santiso, the founder of Madrid-based VC firm Mundi Ventures, gets it 🚀 sifted-content-ui-prod-preview.herokuapp.com/articles/dr...

Wondering how much EU Inc could actually save start ups? Check out Sykk AI's EU Fragmentation Cost Calculator: sykk.ai/tools/eu-st... E.g., an early stage Belgian startup looking to expand to France, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Italy, could save €73,000 in admin fees and scale 12x faster 🤯

European startups struggle to scale. Why? Three bottlenecks, say the IMF: 1️⃣ National capital markets instead of pan-EU 2️⃣ Regulations and barriers limiting labour mobility 3️⃣ Intra-EU trade costs The bloc needs to help its young guns grow faster 👇 www.imf.org/en/blogs/ar...

🎤 We spoke with Damian Boeselager, Co-Founder and MEP for Volt Europa. Full interview: dgprogress.eu/p/dg-progre...

Today, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented the official EU Inc proposal. 📝 Press release: ec.europa.eu/commission/... 🎥 Statement: audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/media/vi...\

The second edition of our newsletter just dropped!👇 🏗️ Capital is pouring into Europe’s AI ecosystem ⛽ The EU’s AI Act is under fire and under review 🌉 MEP Damian Boeselager speaks with us about why he’s championing EU-INC 🛣️ The 28th Regime arrives… open.substack.com/pub/dgprogr...

🇪🇺The leak of the 28th Regime proposal (“EU Inc”!) is MEGA news for European startups and investors 🚀 Across the EU, founders will be able to 🧵

🎉 Great news for EU-INC: the Commission will propose a *Regulation* next week, not a Directive. A big win for cross-border harmonisation ✅ Work still to be done to ensure this proposal delivers for Europe's startups.

🇪🇺 More tech workers are now heading to the EU from the US, than vice versa. The European Dream? 😉

Paris-based AMI Labs enjoyed Europe's largest ever first funding round 🚀 Yan LeCun is building post-LLM "world models" – here in Europe! 🇪🇺

🚀 MERCH HAS LANDED 🚀 What better way to do so than by showing support for DG Progress! Give our team a shout and we’ll be happy to share 💙

🎉 Reasons to be cheerful about European tech 🎉 🇨🇳 European venture capital spending has overtaken China's; now $85 billion to $53 billion. 🧠 More technology workers are going from the US to Europe than the other way round 💪 Europe is raising more than the US in some deep-tech niches.

🌲 Heard of Black Forest Labs? 🇩🇪 Germany's most valuable AI company is a leader in "visual AI", powering the text-to-image features in Grok, Le Chat, Photoshop, and Vibes. Black Forest Labs aims to define how machines see the world 👇 fortune.com/2026/02/17/...

98.5% of the EU's biotech companies that went public last year listed *outside* of the EU 😔 The European Life Sciences Coalition aims to change that 👇 www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/eur...

"We [need to] implement EU-INC, so it's easy to open up companies all over Europe, without so much bureaucracy in 27 member states." 👏 MEP Arba Kokalari on the reforms needed for Europe to compete. @ The Parliament's Tech, Digital, and AI Summit

EU-Inc is coming: a single, straightforward structure for businesses, that works across all EU countries. What does it mean? ⬇️

"Europe's a digital colony" Also Europe:

🇪🇺🧠 Europe's ahead in deep tech areas like quantum technology. Can the EU create an environment that allows its talent to thrive at home?

The surest way for the EU to achieve technological sovereignty is to encourage its own companies to scale up. 🇫🇷 As Mistral AI showed with its acquisition of French cloud startup Koyeb, Europe's big players can provide the capital its startups need. We need more Mistrals. sifted.eu/articles/mi...

🇮🇳 🤖 Here's what Europe's AI leaders had to say at last week's Summit: Macron: AI is a "civilisation-scale" innovation LeCun: AI could boost productivity by about 0.6% per year, which is "actually quite big!" Mensch: "The people who are not catching that [AI] wave are going to be left behind"

🎤 We spoke with Simon Schaefer from Allied for Startups about the EU-INC campaign he co-initiated. Here's what he had to say 🧵

EU President Ursula von der Leyen last month at Davos: 🎤 "Too many companies have to look abroad to grow and scale up partly because they face a new set of rules every time they expand into a new member state." 🇪🇺 The solution? "We call it EU-INC." www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWF...

Why are European tech founders leaving Europe? 1/ Access to capital 2/ Regulatory environment Several drivers are interlinked: a nimbler business environment attracts capital, customers, and talent. www.stateofeuropeantech.com/

Two graphs from Dealroom that tell Europe's story. 🦄 1/4 of the world's unicorn founders are European, but 4/10 end up in the US because that's where over 1/2 of the world's VC money is. We have the talent. Now we need an environment that investors want to bet on 🚀

🤯 Europe accounts for over half of global industrial robotics exports. 💡 14/20 countries with the highest "robot density" are European 🚗 Deep industrial capacity across automotive, machinery, plastics, F&B 🇪🇺 4/5 world's largest exporters are European (Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden)

🇦🇹 Founder of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger, is joining OpenAI. 🇪🇺 Described by OpenAI's chief Sam Altman as a "genius," Peter is proof that the EU has AI talent. ➡️ We need to focus now on creating an environment that allows EU talent to compete at home. www.ft.com/content/45b...