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The State of European Tech-2026 has revealed that the “technology’s market” in the continent has grown from about a trillion dollar a decade ago to presently close to four and half trillion. The report includes the following three main sections: a) bets on fewer founders, b) European first $1 trillion digital/AI company, and the path to get there; and c) the public expectations and opinion on the European technology’s perspectives.
Digital/AI statistics
The general trends in technology, in general, and its digital/AI facets are changing dramatically: since the introduction of ChatGPT between 2022-2023, more than half people across 32 western countries said that products and services using AI have already changed their lives in the past three to five years, and 66% expect AI to have a greater impact on their daily lives in the next three to five years.
Digital technologies and AI tools have accelerated the speed of decision-making and “raised the stakes” in businesses; however, only 11% of corporate communicators believe existing ethical policies are sufficient for widespread AI adoption.
One in four (24%) Americans now say they use AI tools “often,” up from 17% in 2025; but the data centers that power these tools are unpopular. About 44% of Americans said they strongly or somewhat oppose data centers in a June 2026 Reuters/Ipsos poll, and in May 2026, only 27% agreed that AI data centers would significantly contribute to economic growth and job creation in their community.
There is a growing skepticism around AI deployment: about two-thirds of workers expect AI to make the worker experience worse by eliminating jobs and putting greater pressure on workers, rather than improving the worker experience by freeing up time spent on repetitive tasks and assisting with more challenging work. This sentiment is consistent across race, gender, education, and income lines, according to a June 2026 Ipsos poll for Groundwork Collaborative. A majority of Americans also think that the government has a role to play in regulating AI — but Democrats and Republicans are split on the extent of that role.
More in: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence-key-insights-data-and-tables
Additional reading: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence-key-insights-data-and-tables
European digital technologies
Overall, European technologies – mainly digital and AI ecosystems – have gone from $0.9T in 2017 to being valued at $4.4T today; as each milestone is passed, the bar for what is possible is getting higher…
The European digital and technology’s investors are also voicing higher levels of ambition: thus, in 2025, Lovable’s founder, Anton Osika said he wants to build European first $1T company. Lovable is a Swedish vibe coding platform and company founded in Stockholm in 2023: it provides software that allows users to enter prompts to automate software development. Osika has also co-founded the companies Depict.ai and Sana Labs, and is known for creating the open-source AI coding project GPT-Engineer.
Other initiators, like Revolut founders, have described valuations short of $1T as a “stepping stone”. Revolut is a London-headquartered global financial technology company and neobank founded in 2015; it serves over 80 million customers worldwide with digital banking, multi-currency accounts and financial services. Even the UK government has pledged to secure the country’s first trillion-dollar company.
More in: https://www.revolut.com/
European Technology report: main outcomes
The State of European Tech report includes the following three main sections: – Bigger bets on fewer founders; – Europe’s first $1T company, and the path to get there; and – What the public really thinks of European technology? The report, which is commissioned by Atomico (with data contributions from Invest Europe) highlights that Europe’s tech sector has grown into a nearly $4 trillion ecosystem representing roughly 15% of the continent’s GDP.
The current State of European Technology-SET-26 main message is that AI will “rewrite the physical world”; the process, however, will need enormous amounts of capital, and only investors that are “concentrating firepower” behind a few “trends” could expect “to win”.
The European biggest funds keep growing; but bigger funds need bigger outcomes. That raises the bar for what counts as venture-scale and leaves fewer investors writing the smallest cheques: some of this is a “healthy correction from 2021”, notes SET-26.
Europe is backing its most ambitious founders at a scale it never could before, but also backing fewer of everyone else at the start. How far the concentration goes, how Europe compares with the US, and what it means for the next generation of outliers.
Among key findings and metrics are:
= Ecosystem’s size: Europe now hosts nearly 40,000 funded tech companies—up significantly from 13,000 a decade ago in 2016.
= Investment recovery: venture capital investment reached around $44 billion (up 7% year-over-year), with European pension fund allocations to tech rising by 55%.
= Founder’s optimism has hit a 10-year high, with 42% of entrepreneurs saying it is more attractive to build in Europe today than a year prior.
= Deep tech and AI: it accounts presently for 36% of VC investments, fueled by momentum in AI, defence and clean energy, with standout local players like Mistral and Lovable globally.
More on AI in 2025, in: https://digital-skills-jobs.europa.eu/en/latest/news/state-european-tech-2025-what-hot-topics-emerge-luxembourg.
Source and citations from the Report at: https://www.investeurope.eu/publications-policy/publications/2025/the-state-of-european-tech-2025/
Revolut confirmed a $115B valuation this summer, up from $75B a year ago, and it has its sights on a $200B IPO. Three-year-old Mistral raised a record $3B in September at a $24B valuation, while companies like ElevenLabs ($22B) and Lovable ($13.3B) are also scaling at a pace Europe hasn’t seen before. And the most valuable company in Europe is now a tech firm ASML, with a ~$600B market cap. ASML Holding N.V. is a Dutch multinational company and the world’s leading supplier of photolithography systems used by semiconductor manufacturers to produce microchips. At scale like that, European first $1T company “feels graspable and soon”, notes the recent SET-26 report.
More in: https://www.asml.com/en
European trust is dividend
The European public is wary of the snowballing pace of tech progress: e.g. in mid-2026, hackers took control of the fridges in hundreds of French supermarkets, cranking them up as high as 50°C, spoiling food and starting fires. This summer, AI agents broke out of a test environment and hacked Hugging Face. Data centres are hiking energy prices and last week’s AI sell-off hit people’s pensions.
According to Ipsos’s June 2026 AI Monitor, which tracks global attitudes, excitement and concerns regarding artificial intelligence across 32 countries, only about 27 percent of Europeans believe AI will improve their country’s economy. Besides, it notes, global sentiment is split nearly at parity, with 51% of people expressing excitement and 50% feeling nervous about AI. Increasingly, many individuals report feeling both emotions simultaneously. People in Europe and North America people, on average, are more likely to feel nervous about AI.
Source: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/global-attitudes-ai-2026-wonder-vs-worry-divide-deepens
As SET-26 report has shown, the European continent is on its way to its first $1trillion company. But this will be difficult to achieve without the public on side. Public buy-in shapes how governments regulate and where pension and procurement money go, and how quickly new technology is unlocked…
The fastest way to build trust is to show Europeans what’s in it for them: e.g. last year, Quantum Systems completed over 20k flights of its Vector drones in support of Ukrainian defence, and the team now links more than 2.6k businesses to renewable generators, cutting their bills by up to 30 percent.
Atomico partner Tom Wehmeier (he is Partner and Head of Intelligence at Atomico, based in London) and his team’s mission is to share data and insights to help making better decisions. That means cheaper bills and safer communities: hence, if Europe’s best companies are going to reach $1T, the “European citizens should be excited”, concludes SET-26.
Atomico’s roadmap calls for four strategic shifts: building a true pan-European single market/company framework, creating fast-track relocation visas for global talent, mobilizing domestic institutional savings, and reframing European risk culture to celebrate bold entrepreneurship.
Source: https://www.politico.eu/person/tom-wehmeir/