Introduced by Andreas Munk Holm, this EUVC Live at GoWest series spotlights the thought leadership of policymakers, institutional investors, GPs, corporates, and public capital leaders around one defining question:
How does Europe mobilize its own capital to secure its technological future?
Across the sessions, one theme emerges repeatedly:
Europe does not lack talent.
It does not lack innovation.
It does not lack savings.
It lacks coordination.
In this episode, Danijel Višević, General Partner and Co-Founder at World Fund, argues that Europe’s real advantage is not innovation.
It is reinvention under pressure.
Europe has done it before. The Treaty of Paris laid the foundation for integration through coal and steel. The single market removed internal barriers and created a continental scale. The euro aligned monetary systems across borders. Each milestone emerged from constraint. Each crisis forced deeper coordination. Each pressure point triggered structural adaptation.
Today, Europe faces a new convergence of pressures: war on its borders, climate disruption, technological decoupling, fragile supply chains, and fragmented capital markets. The question is no longer whether Europe can innovate. It is whether it can execute at a continental scale.
Sovereignty is no longer primarily political.
It is industrial.
And at the centre of the challenge sits one structural weakness: scale-up capital.
Europe can generate startups. It struggles to finance champions. Without sufficient domestic growth capital, companies relocate, ownership shifts abroad, and strategic technologies scale under different jurisdictions. Danijel’s message is direct: Europe does not break under pressure. It builds together. But only if policy, capital, and industry move as one system.
Sovereignty Is No Longer Political
Today, sovereignty is not an abstract political concept. It is the ability to control the systems that underpin economic and strategic power. It means securing access to semiconductors, lithium, and critical minerals; artificial intelligence capabilities; clean energy infrastructure; and defense technologies.
Europe remains heavily dependent on external suppliers for raw materials, battery inputs, and advanced chip fabrication. Strategic autonomy, therefore, requires more than vibrant startup ecosystems. It requires control over the industrial base that turns innovation into durable capability. In a world of geopolitical fragmentation, industrial depth becomes the real measure of sovereignty.
The Structural Weakness: Scale-Up Capital
Europe produces world-class research and increasingly strong early-stage companies. What it struggles to produce are global champions that remain anchored in Europe. A core theme of Danijel’s keynote is the growth-stage funding gap relative to the United States. While early-stage ecosystems have matured significantly over the past decade, scale-up capital remains thinner, more fragmented, and often dependent on foreign limited partners.
This imbalance has direct strategic consequences. Without sufficient domestic growth capital, companies move closer to deeper pools of funding. Ownership structures shift. Decision-making authority migrates. Technologies with strategic importance scale under different regulatory regimes and industrial priorities.
Scale-up capital is therefore not merely financial infrastructure.
It is a sovereignty infrastructure.
Public–Private Coordination as Leverage
Danijel emphasises that Europe’s opportunity lies in alignment rather than substitution. The objective is not for the state to replace markets, but for public and private capital to act as multipliers in sectors where markets alone move too slowly relative to strategic necessity.
Battery recycling and circular supply chains, quantum computing ecosystems, and climate-driven food innovation are examples of domains that require long investment horizons, coordinated policy frameworks, and blended capital structures. These are not sectors that can rely on short-term capital cycles. They demand systemic thinking.
Europe’s advantage is not that it can outspend larger economies. It is that it has historically demonstrated the ability to coordinate across borders when the stakes are high. But coordination requires policy clarity, capital alignment, and industrial commitment moving in concert.
Reinvention Under Pressure
This is not a nostalgic reflection on past European integration. It is a forward-looking warning. Europe does not lack talent, scientific capability, or aggregate capital. What it lacks is coordination speed, conviction, and scale discipline.
The polycrisis era demands a new alignment between sovereignty and entrepreneurship. Industrial policy, venture capital, and public markets can no longer operate in isolation from one another. They must reinforce a shared strategic direction.
Europe has historically integrated when forced by circumstance. The open question is whether it will move fast enough this time to shape — rather than merely react to — the industries of the future.
Europe does not break under pressure.
It builds together.
