The European map of digital unicorns

The rain of funding in recent years has allowed a strong European technology ecosystem to flourish. The strong appetite of investors for digital start-ups from the Old Continent has translated into increasingly numerous and larger funding rounds, and an escalation in valuations that have led many start-ups to reach the category of unicorn, name by which unlisted emerging companies valued at at least 1,000 million dollars are known.

Now that we are facing a change of cycle due to the challenging macroeconomic situation - which translates into more difficulties in financing and valuations in many cases falling - it is a good time to recapitulate what has been achieved in these golden years, in which we have seen to an authentic "party of unicorns", as the investment bank GP Bullhound has defined it.

Favorable market conditions have allowed many European countries to give birth to start-ups in recent years that have reached the category of unicorns. The UK (46 unicorns, according to the CB Insights ranking), Germany (29) and France (25) are the countries that have added the most companies to the club, but many others have managed to place at least one national digital champion in the ranking.

EXPANSIÓN has identified the largest technological unicorn in 21 European countries. This x-ray (see attached map) confirms the strong interest of investors in companies that compete in the field of fintech and business software.

In the first category are companies such as the British Checkout.com - leader of the European unicorns, with a valuation of 40,000 million dollars - the Swedish Klarna, the Danish Pleo, the Italian Scalapay, the Austrian Bitpanda, the Dutch Mollie or the Greek Viva Wallet.

The business software segment has also given birth to unicorns that are leaders in valuation in several European countries. This is the case of the German Personio, the Belgian Collibra, the Portuguese (although it is now based in the US) Talkdesk, the Swiss SonarSource, the Finnish Aiven, the Irish Browserstack or the Norwegian Cognite, among others.

In the ranking of digital champions by country there is also room for healthtech, where the Polish DocPlanner and the French Doctolib are included. The map is completed with companies from various sectors, from the Spanish personal technology company JobandTalent, through the Lithuanian second-hand fashion website Vinted or the Estonian mobility operator Bolt.

The magnitudes of the European digital entrepreneurial ecosystem vary depending on the reports, but all analysts agree that Europe has become a factory of technological unicorns, which has made it possible to reduce the great distance that separates us from the United States.

"Five years ago you could put all the unicorns on the continent in one dining room and mourn all the lost tech giants of Europe. Today, you would need a 321-seat auditorium and hear a completely different story," Irish entrepreneur John Collison summed up. co-founder and president of Stripe.

The entrepreneur refers to the 321 unicorns that, according to Atomico, there were in Europe at the end of 2021, a historic year because for the first time the figure of 100,000 million dollars of annual investment in European technology-based start-ups was exceeded. The figure triples the volume of financing in 2020 and multiplies by ten that of 2015.

According to GP Bullhound, which also counts Israel in its report, since 2014 the size of the technological entrepreneurial ecosystem has multiplied by ten, which has an aggregate valuation of 1,100 million dollars.