Which European countries are winning the tech funding race?
Investment in European tech startups is rebounding after a slow summer, but remains unevenly spread with the UK capturing almost half of all funding, according to figures from tech.eu.
European tech funding surged to €15.8 billion across 300 funding deals in September, bringing the total for 2026 to almost €60 billion, according to the latest figures from online publication tech.eu, although half was made up by UK investments.
The spike in activity represents a quarter of the year’s investment so far, a strong rebound on August’s activity which saw just €3.2 billion raised across 165 deals.
The activity also shows that European companies are attracting significant investment in technology, raising the prospect that they could one day scale up and help ease the continent’s reliance on US Big Tech.
However, investment still falls way behind the US, which attracted $50 billion in the same period and $800 billion in annual cloud/AI infrastructure.
Of September’s 300 deals, 25 companies raised more than €100 million each, including three rounds exceeding €1 billion secured by AI platform company Mistral and AI infrastructure firm Nscale. 34 deals were made with undisclosed values.
September’s largest deal came from French AI company Mistral, raising €3 billion in a series D round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion.
Cloud computing and artificial intelligence secured the most investment by sector, with €5.541 billion invested in cloud across 44 deals and €4.194 billion in AI.
Fintech (€847.7 million), health tech (€826.3 million), space (€725.8 million), robotics (€508.3 million), software (€421.1 million), security (€319.8 million), telecoms (€315 million) and deep tech (€274.5 million) made up the rest of the top 10 invested tech industries.
The UK remains Europe’s top fundraising market in September, securing €7.3 billion, half of the month’s total, in over 65 transactions.
Trailing the UK are France (€3.478 billion), Germany (€1.155 billion), the Netherlands (€1.119 billion), Spain (€615.8 million), Portugal (€524.1 million), Sweden (€399.9 million), Italy (€373.1 million), Bulgaria (€177.7 million) and Finland (€175.8 million).
September’s investments were made by more than 11,700 investors, with French public sector investment bank BPI France taking part in the most deals (8).
German public-private venture capital firm High-Tech Gründerfonds came in second with 7, followed by Italian venture capital firm Vento with 6, the UK’s national innovation agency Innovate UK with 6, UK venture capital firm Balderton Capital with 5, and the European Investment Bank with 5.
The EU has a number of funding instruments targeting tech, as the bloc aims to not only end its reliance on America’s Big Tech but also secure its own technology sovereignty.
In July, the European Commission launched a €10 billion public-private initiative to support the building of seven AI gigafactories across Europe. It also aims to unlock €20 billion in private funding to power trillion-parameter models to rival leaders such as Claude and ChatGPT.
The European Investment Bank also runs the TechEU Programme, which pools €70 billion in debt and equity to mobilise €250 billion by 2027 to take European startups from seed to IPO.
The European Commission has also made available €8.1 billion worth of funding through its Digital Europe Programme to support supercomputing, cybersecurity, advanced digital skills and semiconductors via the Chips Act.
And finally, there’s the Scaleup Europe Fund, a €5 billion initiative managed by Swedish private equity firm EQT to invest in AI, quantum computing, clean tech and biotech.
