- Antler‘s new report, A Tale of Two Tiers, analyses 760 European unicorn founders and 81,055 funding rounds since 2000, and finds record-breaking “rocketship” unicorns masking a collapse in early-stage funding.
- Seed-to-Series A conversion has fallen from 23.3% to just 9.3%, with deals at pre-seed, seed and Series A down 38%, 41% and 45% since 2021, while the number of active early-stage investors has dropped by more than 40%.
- On stage, Dame Julia Hoggett, Saul Klein, Fredrik Cassel and Erik Sebusch dissected a UK scale-up funding gap of 50 billion pounds a year, while Gen Z founders from Qorelo and Ralio compared fundraising favourably to dating.
It has been four Septembers since Tech Funding News first walked into Antler’s European Founder Conference, and the formula has not changed: no sprawling exhibition halls, just an invite-only gathering of handpicked founders, investors and ecosystem builders with the ambition to shape the next decade of European tech.
This year, 30 of Antler’s most promising European founders joined 400 VCs and LPs at the British Film Institute, and the crowd was noticeably younger, with Gen Z founders from Antler’s UK and European portfolio everywhere you looked.
Christoph Klink, partner at Antler and co-leader of its Central Europe business, told TFN the event’s design is deliberate. “It’s still large, still intimate. You can bring people together, create real connections,” he said, explaining why the first day is founders-only and why London has hosted all four editions.
“It is undeniably the biggest, most dense tech ecosystem,” he added.
A tale of two tiers
The centrepiece was Antler’s new report, A Tale of Two Tiers: Europe’s Rocketships and The Early-Stage Funding Crisis, which analysed 760 unicorn founders, 4,129 Series A founders and 81,055 European funding rounds since 2000. Its conclusion is deliberately uncomfortable: at the exact moment Europe is minting record-breaking unicorns, the pipeline that produces them is showing signs of collapse.
On the bright side, 33 rocketship unicorns now exist in Europe: companies founded after 2020 that hit a $1B valuation in 2 years on average, compared with 7.2 years for the pre-2020 generation. They raise every 8 months rather than every 14, attract US Tier 1 VCs far earlier, and 43% of them are headquartered in London, more than any other European city. After years of drought, Europe created 4 decacorns in 2025 and 4 more already in 2026.
Antler splits them into two archetypes: Jets are lean, capital-efficient revenue machines such as Lovable and Legora, built by founders who average 31 years old, 81% of whom have held leadership roles, and none of whom come from Big Tech or research labs. Juggernauts are capital-intensive deep tech companies in defence, energy and frontier AI, such as AMI Labs, Ineffable Intelligence and Fuse Energy, built by older founders (average age 37), 38.5% of whom are PhDs.
The money follows the split: Juggernauts have absorbed $22.59B across 60 rounds, with median seed rounds of $16.3M, against $1.45M for pre-2020 unicorns.
The crisis underneath
Beneath the record rounds, the report finds the early-stage market thinning at alarming speed. Pre-seed activity exploded by 197% between 2016 and 2025, but Series A deals grew just 5% in the same period. Since 2021, deal volume at pre-seed, seed and Series A has fallen by 38%, 41% and 45% respectively. The seed to Series A conversion rate, which averaged 23.3% between 2008 and 2019, dropped to 13.1% in 2022 and 9.3% in 2023. Fewer than 1 in 10 European startups now makes it to Series A.
The report’s diagnosis is not better picking or worse founders, but a collapse in the number of investors. Active pre-seed and seed investors have dropped 42% since 2022, Series A investors by 44.7%, and new entrants backing early-stage startups by 45.2%.
Klink confirmed the trend in an exclusive interview with TFN. “When you look at the number of active investors in pre-seed and Series A, that number has come down 40 to 50% in just 4 or 5 years,” he said, noting Antler tracked around 150 new funds a year at the peak, 35 last year, and fewer than a dozen so far in 2026.
Meanwhile, rocketship cap tables average 7.3 investors at seed, roughly double the pre-2020 norm. “It seems like Europe is crowdfunding its winners” he noted.
The cost of missed companies is quantifiable, Antler argues. The two strongest predictors of seed to Series A conversion are a top-quartile seed round of $2M to $5M and a founder who previously worked at a scaling startup; 27 startups from the 2021/22 seed cohort meet both criteria and still have not raised a Series A. Restoring the conversion rate to its pre-2020 level would cost $2.74B, just 10% of what rocketship unicorns have raised, and would produce an estimated 3 additional European unicorns a year.
“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,” said Klink, adding, “this is a crisis that can be fixed. But we need to act now.”
The £50B question
If the report flagged the bottom of the funnel, the sharpest panel tackled the top. It brought together Dame Julia Hoggett, CEO of the London Stock Exchange; Saul Klein, co-founder and chair of Phoenix Court, wearing an immigrant-labelled sweatshirt that spoke louder than any slide about who builds Europe’s companies; Fredrik Cassel, general partner at Creandum; Erik Sebusch of Mercer; and Antler Nordics general partner Tobias Bengtsdahl moderating.
Hoggett made the case for Pisces, the LSE’s new private-share trading venue, as a way to end cold-call IPOs. “You turn up as the seller at IPO and go, well, you know me, you’ve achieved value through me,” she said, adding, “I’ve never seen a market build as quickly,” with 25 auction agents already registered.
Klein, citing Michael Mauboussin’s research that the US should have 5,000 to 12,000 more public companies, pointed to Europe’s hidden bench of 700 venture-backed companies doing over $100M in revenue.
“It’s not just the three we hear about,” he said, arguing the UK alone is “50 billion a year light at scale-up stage.” Cassel was blunt on where pension capital belongs: “Pension money should go where the returns are highest,” he said.
Gen Z has entered the chat
Among the new faces was Louis Schmidlin, co-founder and CEO of Berlin-based Qorelo, which TFN covered when it raised its €3M seed round for AI SAP transformation. “I feel like fundraising is easier than dating,” he joked, before adding, “As a Gen Z founder, it’s your task to go a bit crazy.”
Ghali Bennani Laafiret, co-founder and CEO of Ralio, the London fintech building a trust layer for AI agentic payments, rejected the geography debate entirely. “You can be a founder from anywhere. I moved here to build a company, was able to raise funding. It’s just about building a great business,” he said. TFN covered Ralio’s $2.5M pre-seed earlier this year, the largest agentic payments round in Europe to date, which was three times oversubscribed within three months of founding and backed by Antler from day one.
Second-time founder Kate Hofman, who raised £100M for vertical farming pioneer GrowUp Farms, has raised over £800,000 in 18 months for Pesto, an AI-native ERP for food and drink brands. “It’s never been a better time to build a business in Europe, and it’s always hard to raise funding,” she said.
The findings land as European capital reorganises around exactly this gap, with Uplift Ventures launching a €100M fund to help deep tech companies make the jump from seed to Series A. Europe, in other words, has learned to build rocketships. The question the conference left hanging is whether it will keep funding the launchpads.
This content is published as part of our media partnership with Antler.
