In a press release issued on Thursday, 28 May, on the occasion of its first European Startup and Scaleup Scoreboard (ESSS) being published, the European Commission indicated that the European startup and scaleup ecosystem has been steadily growing.
“The scoreboard reveals a clear trend: pro-startup policies drive real results. Since 2020, the baseline year for the Scoreboard, 20 out of 27 EU Member States have improved their performance, proving that targeted support for founders fuels innovation, job creation, and economic growth,” it says.
The highest-performing countries in 2025 were Estonia, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and Denmark—with results well above the EU average (from 40 to 60 percentage points) across 36 indicators, “showing how bold policies translate into thriving ecosystems”, according to the press release.
Estonia is leading the way on digital infrastructure and seed funding, with 615 venture capital-backed companies per million inhabitants—the highest figure in the EU. Sweden is excelling in talent and later-stage financing, with 409 ‘unicorns’ per million inhabitants—a figure that is higher than that of any other EU country.
Finland is combining making a significant investment in R&D with filing a large number of patents, thus proving that innovation and commercialisation are inextricably linked.
The scoreboard also shows untapped potential in emerging countries (Greece, Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Romania), whose scores are 30 percentage points below the EU average across the 36 indicators measured.
[The European Commission states,] “Three key challenges stand out: weak venture capital access [...]; scaling bottlenecks [with] fragmented regulations and slow administrative processes delay[ing] expansion [...]; [and] brain drain [with] talent leav[ing] for more dynamic ecosystems”.
The 36 indicators taken into account include, among others, the extent of governmental support, the number of innovators per million inhabitants, and the number of individuals employed by these companies who hold a tertiary degree.
Link to the scoreboard: https://aeur.eu/f/m3s (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)