At the Scale-Up Europe Conference today, a number of EU member states including France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Greece announced a brand new initiative for financing growth funds (and ultimately, to fund more homegrown tech scale-ups).
In conjunction with the European Investment Bank and EU-based state banks, the initial allocation of the fund-of-funds - which will be managed by the European Investment Fund - will be €3.5 billion, said Bruno Le Maire, French Minister of the Economy and Finance in one of the closing statements of the event (France currently holds the presidency of the Council of the European Union).
Over time, the goal is for the group of supporting EU countries to grow in number, as well as the total size of the fund-of-funds to €10 billion or more, in order to spur a significantly increased availability of growth capital for European tech champions (as well as diminish the growing influence of US and Asian-based investors).
Another stated ("long-term") goal: growing the number of European funds that have more than €1 billion to invest from 2 to 10 or even 20 in the coming years.
We'll update this post if/as we learn more about the 'European Tech Champions Initiative' (ETCI), which should be up and running by the end of this year.
You can find the joint declaration via this link.
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