Antler research reveals Europe’s unicorn boom is masking an early-stage funding crisis

Today a new report reveals that while a new generation of rocketship unicorns are breaking records for funding rounds and valuations in Europe, the early-stage funding pipeline is collapsing. 

Announced today in London at global VC Antler’s European Founder Conference, the research analysed 760 unicorn founders, 4,129 Series A founders, and 81,055 funding rounds in Europe since 2000.

The conclusion is clear — rocketship unicorns are redefining what tech companies can achieve in Europe, but while we have now fixed Europe’s growth-funding problem, we have walked into an early-stage funding crisis. 

Europe’s Rocketships, and the rise of Juggernauts

33 rocketship unicorns now exist in Europe – companies that were founded after 2020 and have achieved unicorn status. 

However, according to Antler, unicorns founded in Europe post-2020 behave very differently to those founded before. On average, they take two years to reach unicorn status, compared to 7.2 years pre-2020. They are attracting more US Tier 1 VCs at earlier stages, adding more VCs to their cap tables, and raising far more at Seed and Series A than we’ve previously seen in Europe. 

The two founder profiles powering Europe’s rocketships: Antler has identified two distinct categories of rocketship unicorns - Jets and Juggernauts. 

Jets are lean, capital-efficient, revenue machines like Lovable and Legora.  Juggernauts are capital-intensive deep tech companies building in sectors like defence, energy and frontier labs like AMI Labs, Ineffable Intelligence and Fuse Energy. 

Whilst the vast majority of Jet and Juggernaut founders are technical (77 per cent of all unicorns founded in Europe since 2022), the founders also fall into two distinct profiles: 

Juggernaut founders tend to be older and more academically experienced than Jets founders. Their average age at founding is 37, compared with 31 for Jets, while 38.5 per cent hold PhDs, versus just 10 per cent of Jets founders.

Around 35 per cent of Juggernaut founders have previously worked in Big Tech or research labs, compared with none of the Jets cohort. However, Jets founders are more likely to have technical backgrounds (71 per cent versus 65.9 per cent) and significantly more likely to have held leadership roles (81 per cent versus 51.4 per cent).

Serial entrepreneurship is more common among Juggernaut founders, at 45 per cent compared with 38 per cent for Jets.

Further, despite the success of rocketship unicorns in Stockholm and Paris, London is home to 43 per cent of these companies — more than any other European city. 

Less than one in ten startups now makes it to Series A

In terms of early-stage funding, since 2016, pre-seed funding exploded by 197 per cent between 2016 and 2025.

But in the same time frame, Series A deals only rose by 5 per cent - they simply aren’t keeping pace. In fact, while the number of founders in Europe is increasing, pre-seed, seed, and Series A deals have fallen by 38 per cent, 41 per cent, and 45 per cent since 2021, respectively. 

A real bottleneck is emerging at Series A.

Between 2008 and 2019, 23.3 per cent of startups that raised Seed rounds in Europe went on to raise Series A rounds.  That conversion rate is now falling. It was 13.1 per cent in 2022, and 9.3 per cent in 2023. In other words, less than one in ten European startups ever makes it to Series A. 

Why is this happening?

All the evidence analysed in the report suggests the real reason is a collapse in the number of active investors backing European startups from pre-seed through Series A. 

The number of active investors steadily grew in Europe until 2022. Since then, the number of investors making deals at pre-seed and seed stage dropped by 42 per cent.

The number of Series A investors fell by 44.7 per cent, and the number of growth-stage investors fell by 30 per cent.  The number of new investors entering the market is also falling.

The number of new investors backing early-stage startups fell by 45.2 per cent since 2022, whilst the number of new investors backing growth-stage companies only fell by 0.7 per cent since 2022. 

Antler analysed all the variables that increase the chance of a startup converting a Series A round from a Seed. 

The two biggest contributing factors were:

• Raising a top-quartile Seed ($2 million to $5 million) and
• Having at least one founder who previously worked at a scaling startup. 

The firm contends that there are 27 startups that raised Seed rounds in 2021/22 who perfectly meet that criteria, but haven’t yet raised a Series A.

These are companies that, by the industry’s own metrics, should succeed, but were missed.  To close the early-stage funding gap, and bring the number of startups converting Seed to Series A rounds back to a pre-2020 23.3 per cent conversion rate would cost $2.74BN. 

This sounds like a significant amount, but is the equivalent of just 10 per cent of all funding raised by rocketship unicorns. Restoring this funding pipeline would produce an estimated 3 additional European unicorns every year, driving long-term economic growth, job creation, and ecosystem liquidity.

Christoph Klink, Partner at Antler, comments:

"Whilst everyone chases the headline-grabbing mega funding rounds, there are fewer and fewer investors backing new startups. We are strangling a new generation of European founders when every indicator suggests they are more qualified and skilled than ever.

This crisis can be fixed. And fixing it will allow investors to find unicorns and outlier founders in the process. But we need to act now.”