How Europe could build its next deep tech unicorn

Impact Loop’s deep tech meetup in Kista, Stockholm, on Friday brought together over 100 investors and entrepreneurs from across Sweden and beyond.

On one of the panels, three prominent investors gathered to discuss how Europe could nurture the next wave of deep tech champions. Einride’s planned IPO provided the ideal icebreaker.

“It’s fantastic just to see the IPO market picking up,” said Mala Valroy, investment manager at Industrifonden, opening the panel. She noted that climate and deep tech firms have been held to a “higher bar” than typical venture-backed companies. Einride’s ability to reach the “goalpost,” she said, is an important moment – though she wondered “how replicable it is.”

Anna Fredrixon, partner at Norrsken Launcher, echoed the general optimism but says she would’ve preferred that Einride go public closer to home. “Of course it would be great if we had an IPO in Sweden… but in the US they’ve got the experience, the comparables, the network, the capital.”

Almost 40% of EU scaleups since 2013 choose to list in the US, citing deeper liquidity and more attractive valuations on US exchanges, according to the EIB’s Scaleup Gap report.

Backing Einride

No one felt Einride’s IPO announcement more viscerally than Marek Kiisa, managing partner at NordicNinja VC – an early investor who backed Einride nearly seven years ago. He recalled watching the company evolve into a “logistics and autonomous-systems leader” that has effectively turned Gothenburg into “the European epicentre of autonomous.”

But Kiisa didn’t dwell too long on nostalgia. He quickly pivoted directly to a systemic weakness – Europe’s lack of growth-stage capital.

“There is no such amount of growth money in Europe [compared to the US],” Kiisa said, citing Bolt – another NordicNinja portfolio company – which had to raise large rounds in the United States. “It’s literally European retirement funds’ money, which is sent to the US, and then comes back to European companies. This is completely wrong.”

Science into startups

If capital is one friction point, commercialisation is another. Fredrixon argued that Europe excels at research but still struggles to turn inventions into scalable companies.

“We have all these great innovations… but we’re not as good as the US or China when it comes to actually making it commercial,” she said.

Her advice to deep tech founders was to hire commercial talent “really, really early,” start talking to customers far sooner than feels comfortable, and work with corporations willing to provide a testing ground for cutting-edge technology through pilot projects.

Another big topic of discussion was speed. Deep tech startups rarely scale at the pace of software businesses. Their technologies often require lab work, specialised equipment, and long certification timelines – a combination that tends to slow commercial rollout and demands larger upfront investment.

However, Valroy pushed back on the assumption that deep tech inherently takes longer or is riskier.

“It’s a different risk,” she said. “You go in with more technology risk, but almost no commercial risk because you’re a market maker.”

Deep-tech exits, Valroy argued, often land in the five-to-ten-year window – and can produce “astronomically better” multiples than crowded software categories.

Building in Europe

Europe has great deep tech strengths, the investors agreed, including a deep pool of technical talent, a strong STEM pipeline from some of best universities, and access to industrial partners that provide real-world testing grounds. They also pointed to a culture of tackling meaningful problems.

So what’s missing? According to the investors, more local growth funds. More M&A activity from Europe’s industrial giants. More cross-pollination between repeat founders and scientific brains. And, as Volroy put it, more “Spotify Mafias” – people who’ve run the gauntlet and come back hungry to build the next wave of tech.