Sovereign Scaling: Keeping Europe’s Tech Champions in Europe

Sovereign Scaling: Keeping Europe’s Tech Champions in Europe

Speakers:
Cristina Caffarra, Co-Founder & Chair, EuroStack Initiative Foundation e.V.
Neil Shah, Head of Tech, Primary Markets, London Stock Exchange PLC
Leo Ringer, Founding Partner, Form Ventures
Lucy Frazer, Former UK Cabinet Minister, Advisory Board Member, Quantexa

Despite progress on producing start-ups and scale-ups, Europe still struggles to consistently keep its most ambitious companies, capital and leadership anchored here as they grow.

The US still offers a more attractive scaling environment for many high-growth businesses, with deeper pools of late-stage capital, stronger analyst coverage, a larger domestic market, and a more compelling route to public markets.

If Europe wants to build globally significant tech companies, it has to think about the full scaling journey - growth capital, pension fund investment, public procurement, talent, the attractiveness of domestic public markets - and whether recent efforts on listings reform are enough to make London and European exchanges more competitive.

What would it take to make Europe not just a good place to found a company, but a credible place to scale one, list one and keep one?

Proposed discussion topics:

• Why do so many European scale-ups still see the US as the natural next step?
• How much of the problem is access to capital, and how much is about market structure, talent and policy?
• What role do listings, liquidity and research coverage play in the decision to stay, move or list elsewhere?
• Have recent listings reforms gone far enough to make London and European markets more attractive for growth companies?
• What should policymakers, investors and exchanges do differently?

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