LEVEL UP brings together top voices shaping the funding landscape

At first glance, Europe’s innovation scene looks vibrant. From cutting-edge AI research to climate tech breakthroughs, the continent is buzzing with startups and scale-ups trying to solve global challenges. But behind the headlines lies a stubborn truth: too many promising European companies either fail to scale or choose to relocate overseas when growth capital runs dry. Compared to the United States or China, Europe still lags behind in terms of late-stage investment, ease of scaling, and IPO exit options.

This is the backdrop against which four influential voices will take the stage at the LEVEL UP 2025 event in Eindhoven on September 29. Their panel, “Financing the European Innovation Landscape,” brings together perspectives from venture building, corporate partnerships, venture capital, and public investment. Together, they will attempt to answer a pressing question: how can Europe build a smarter, more sustainable, and future-ready financing model for innovation?

A fragmented playing field

The challenges are well documented. While Europe produces more startups than ever, the transition from early-stage to growth remains perilous. Seed and Series A capital are relatively accessible, but Series B and beyond is often led by non-European investors. Roughly 82 percent of European scale-up deals already involve a foreign lead investor, and a significant portion of successful founders eventually take their companies to the US to secure the funding and market access they need. The reasons are structural: fragmented capital markets, cautious pension funds, complex insolvency regimes, and uneven rules for employee stock options.

Sectorally, Europe’s position is mixed: AI lags behind the US/China in investment and scaling; biotech IPOs are smaller; clean-tech is competitive in invention but struggles with manufacturing scale-up; defense tech is a fast-rising outlier, with a surge in VC investment since 2022, and much more to come.

What Europe still lacks

1. Company-creation engines tied to markets. Europe needs repeatable venture-building capacity around universities and corporations that can turn IP into customers more quickly, especially in deep tech.
2. Bridge capital for 'first-of-a-kind'. Hardware pilots (fabs, robotics, photonics, climate) must be saved from dying in the 'infrastructure valley'. Blended finance and anchor customers can pull them through.
3. A tighter triangle of public funds, corporates, and private VC. The winning playbooks couple early de-risking (public) with market access (corporate) and scaling discipline (VC/growth).

Yet Europe is not standing still. Public actors, such as the European Investment Bank, InvestEU, and national promotional banks, are injecting record sums into the system, aiming to attract private capital and establish a more robust capital base. Corporations like ASML are beginning to see themselves not only as buyers but also as investors. New models of venture building are demonstrating how early-stage companies can mitigate the risk of failure. The four experts at LEVEL UP each play a role in this evolving landscape. This is what to expect:

Building companies at scale

Dirk Deroost

For Dirk Deroost, co-founder of the Belgian Cronos Groep, the problem is not just about money; it is about building the right structures around founders. Cronos has grown into one of Europe’s largest venture builders, with over 9,000 employees and a portfolio comprising hundreds of companies. Each year, the group helps launch around 20 new ventures, offering not only capital but also a full stack of services, from payroll to legal advice, and, perhaps most importantly, access to customers.

“Funding is one thing,” Deroost has said in earlier interviews, “but what startups often need most is their first paying client.” Cronos leverages its corporate network to shorten the distance between an idea and a marketable product. In a European ecosystem where many startups struggle to validate their business model, that approach can be as valuable as venture capital.

Corporate power as catalyst

Evelien de Vries, ASML

The role of corporates in this financing chain is exemplified by Evelien de Vries, Partnership Manager for Startups & VC at ASML. The world’s most important chip machine builder has not traditionally been known for venture capital. Yet in 2025, ASML surprised the industry with a billion-dollar investment in French AI company Mistral. The move signaled a recognition that strategic technologies such as AI and photonics cannot be left to chance, such as AI and photonics, cannot be left to chance or to foreign investors.

ASML’s influence goes far beyond equity tickets. By opening its supply chain, test facilities, and procurement systems to startups, the company can serve as a launchpad for deep tech ventures that would otherwise struggle to meet industry standards. De Vries’s task is to make those partnerships possible, bridging the gap between the rigor of a multinational and the agility of a startup. In doing so, ASML embodies the principle that procurement and partnerships can sometimes accelerate innovation more effectively than capital alone.

Giving venture capital a stronger voice

Martijn van Dam

If venture builders and corporates form the front line, the policy voice of the investment community is represented by Martijn van Dam, chair of the board at the Dutch Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (NVP). Europe’s bottlenecks are not a secret: pension funds rarely invest in venture, employee stock options are taxed unevenly, and cross-border investments are slowed by regulatory frictions.

Van Dam and his association lobby to change that reality. Their message is simple: if Europe wants to keep its most promising companies, it must make risk capital more available at home. That means unlocking pension money for venture capital, harmonizing rules for employee ownership, and simplifying restructuring so that founders can recover from failure. These may sound like technical issues, but they determine whether an ambitious founder in Eindhoven or Berlin chooses to grow in Europe or move to Silicon Valley.

Public capital with a mission

Rinke Zonneveld, Invest-NL

Finally, there is the role of public catalytic capital, embodied by Rinke Zonneveld, CEO of Invest-NL. The Dutch state investment agency has become a central player in channeling funds into strategic sectors such as energy transition, circular economy, and deeptech. Its €250 million Deep Tech Fund is designed specifically to support the kind of capital-intensive ventures that private investors often shy away from.

Zonneveld’s challenge is to strike a balance between speed and strategy. Public money must not crowd out private investors, but rather unlock them by taking on risk or building fund-of-fund structures that attract institutional money. Just as crucial is Invest-NL’s convening power. By aligning regulatory frameworks, such as the 'end-of-waste' status for recycled materials, Invest-NL can remove barriers that block innovative companies from scaling, even when funding is available.

A chain of responsibilities

Seen together, the four experts sketch a financing chain that Europe urgently needs to strengthen. Venture builders like Cronos mitigate early-stage risks by providing services and securing initial customers. Corporations like ASML can act as both strategic investors and demanding launch clients. Industry associations such as NVP push for regulatory reforms that unlock private capital at scale. And public investors, such as Invest-NL, ensure that strategic sectors receive the catalytic funds and enabling environment they require.

The question for Europe is how to make this chain work more efficiently and cohesively. The continent has no shortage of talent or ideas. What it lacks is the seamless financial infrastructure that allows those ideas to grow into global companies without crossing the Atlantic.

Level Up 2025’s panel on financing can design a practical roadmap: from idea to customer, from startup to scale-up, from Europe to the world. Whether that roadmap will finally close the continent’s scale-up gap depends on how these players and the ecosystems they represent choose to act in the years to come.

Visiting LEVEL UP 2025 is free of charge, but registration is mandatory. You'd better be fast, because the event is almost sold out.