Built in Europe Campaign Bets Against the Silicon Valley Exit

The Built in Europe campaign, a six-figure advertising push from European venture capital firm Balderton Capital, went live on June 1 with billboards across London, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin and Munich and the public backing of more than 100 founders from Revolut, Mistral, Wayve and ElevenLabs. Its pitch is blunt: you do not have to move to Silicon Valley to build something that matters.

The message arrives during the busiest stretch of Europe’s tech calendar, timed to London Tech Week and Founders Forum. It also arrives on top of a stubborn set of numbers. European startups still raise roughly a sixth of what their US rivals pull in as a share of output, and the distance is widest at the growth stage, the exact point where a promising company either becomes a giant or gets bought.

What the Campaign Puts on the Billboards

The push is deliberately physical. In London it took the Old Street roundabout screen, the symbolic centre of the city’s startup scene; in Paris it landed on the facade of Station F; in Stockholm it claimed the Stureplan billboard. Digital advertising vans were parked in each city’s tech quarter, and the whole run was costed at hundreds of thousands of pounds. The timing is no accident, slotted to overlap London Tech Week, Founders Forum, the SXSW (South by Southwest) festival, Stockholm’s Sommarminglet and the full stretch of VivaTech in Paris.

The roster reads like a directory of the continent’s better-known names. You can browse the full founder lineup behind the campaign, which spans AI labs, deep-tech bets and consumer brands:

• Artificial intelligence: Mistral AI, ElevenLabs, Lovable, Synthesia
• Deep tech and infrastructure: Wayve, Quantum Systems, Proxima Fusion, The Exploration Company
• Consumer and fintech: Revolut, Voi, Alan, Beauty Pie, GoCardless, Lendable

Sitting underneath the posters is the part designed to outlast them. The campaign points to BuiltInEurope.com, a jobs platform that aggregates open roles from what Balderton calls Europe’s top 1,000 tech startups, built in-house with direct data feeds and pitched as the continent’s largest startup talent hub. The slogans grab attention for a week; the jobs board is the asset meant to keep working after the vans drive home.

The Funding Gap the Posters Leave Out

Confidence is cheap to print. Capital is not. Europe’s most cited industry scorecard, the State of European Tech report, puts European tech investment at roughly $44 billion for 2025, a 7% rise on the year but a fraction of what flows through the United States. The cleaner comparison is funding measured against the size of each economy, because that strips out the fact that the US is simply larger.

On that basis the gap is hard to argue with. European tech investment ran at about 0.17% of output last year; the US figure sat near 0.61%, even after stripping out OpenAI’s $40 billion round. The picture gets worse the later you look in a company’s life. You can read the underlying breakdown in the 2025 European startup investment data, which tracks where the money thins out.

That late-stage line is the one the campaign quietly steps around. European growth funding runs at about a tenth of US volumes, and that is the rung where a company stops being a clever startup and starts being a market mover.

Why Founders Still Board the Plane to San Francisco

The narrative the campaign wants to kill is the one where talented people leave. The data says that narrative is grounded in real economics, not just nerves.

The Growth-Stage Cliff

European companies start about as strong as American ones. They are simply far less likely to keep climbing. Among businesses founded in 2016, US startups proved twice as likely to raise rounds of $50 million or more, the point at which scale becomes self-reinforcing. The weakness is not in ideas or early funding; it shows up precisely when a company needs serious growth capital to hire fast and expand across borders.

The most quoted example is Mira Murati, the Albanian-born former chief technology officer of OpenAI, who launched her own venture in San Francisco in 2025 at a $2 billion valuation. The report that tracks the sector flagged that round as something Europe has essentially never produced for a company that young.

The Pull of US Capital

Even firms that stay rooted in Europe often reach across the Atlantic for their biggest cheques, which is how relocation pressure builds in the first place. The numbers below frame the squeeze.

• Twice as likely: US companies in the 2016 cohort outpaced European peers on $50M-plus rounds.
• Around 50%: share of late-stage funding for European deep-tech and life-sciences spinouts that comes from outside Europe, mostly the US.
• $2 billion: the San Francisco valuation a European-trained founder reached in a single early round.

None of that is a confidence problem. It is a structural one, and a billboard at the Old Street roundabout does not change the term sheet on offer at the growth stage.

The Confidence Case Has Real Receipts

The campaign is not spin dressed up as data, though. Its central boast is true. Europe crossed 400 billion-dollar companies in 2025, up from 127 in 2016, with 28 new unicorns minted in a single year. Dealroom values the wider European tech sector at about $6.7 trillion, and the sector now accounts for roughly 15% of the region’s economy, up from 4% a decade ago.

The proof points are not abstract either. Revolut, one of the named backers, recently secured its full UK banking licence after a five-year wait, a milestone for a company that never decamped to California. Mistral, another signatory, has kept raising at scale from a Paris base, including a recent round that underlined how European AI valuations are climbing.

Anton Osika, co-founder of the Swedish coding startup Lovable, put the optimistic case plainly.

There has never been a better time to build from Europe than now. The talent is here, the capital is here, the ecosystem is here. And we have the ambition to match.

That ambition is the honest core of the message, and Suranga Chandratillake, a partner at Balderton Capital, says the goal is to drown out a feedback loop he watched build online. He described the campaign as an attempt at “trying to shift the conversation from Europe could be great to pointing out that it already is great,” a line laid out further in his own account of the thinking behind the campaign.

Governments Are Writing Cheques the Slogans Cannot

The most telling endorsement of the gap thesis comes from the public sector, which has stopped arguing about morale and started funding the missing rung. The European Commission and the European Investment Bank (EIB, the EU’s lending arm) have stood up a €5 billion late-stage growth vehicle for European scale-ups, the Scaleup Europe Fund, designed expressly to close the financing gap that has pushed companies to raise abroad and, in many cases, relocate.

That fund is no longer theoretical. The Commission has selected Sweden’s EQT to manage the €5 billion mandate, beating the UK’s Atomico and France’s Eurazeo, with the vehicle due to be presented formally at the European Innovation Council (EIC, the EU’s deep-tech funding body) summit and its first investments expected later in the year.

London is running a parallel play. The UK government-backed Sovereign AI fund is built to keep the country’s best AI startups domiciled and scaling at home rather than chasing capital overseas. Both schemes target the same pressure point the campaign celebrates its way around: money at the moment a company is ready to get big.

So the season ahead has two scoreboards running at once. One is emotional, measured in billboards, founder quotes and a jobs board that wants to keep European talent in European offices. The other is financial, measured in whether EQT’s €5 billion and the UK fund actually start landing growth rounds that founders no longer feel they have to fly to find.

If those cheques start clearing through the back half of 2026, the campaign’s slogan ages into a fact. If they stall, the posters will read like wishful thinking the next time a founder weighs a San Francisco term sheet against a London one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Built in Europe campaign?

It is a six-figure advertising and recruitment campaign created by venture firm Balderton Capital, launched on June 1, 2026. It runs on billboards and digital formats in London, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin and Munich, and argues that founders can build globally significant companies without relocating to Silicon Valley.

Which companies are backing it?

More than 100 European founders and CEOs signed on, including the leaders of Revolut, Mistral, Wayve, ElevenLabs, Lovable, Synthesia, Voi, Alan, Quantum Systems and Proxima Fusion. The mix spans AI, deep tech and consumer technology.

What is BuiltInEurope.com?

It is a jobs platform tied to the campaign that aggregates open roles from what Balderton describes as Europe’s top 1,000 tech startups. It was built in-house using direct data feeds and API integrations, and is pitched as the continent’s largest startup talent hub.

Does Europe really have a startup funding gap?

Yes, especially at the growth stage. European tech investment runs at roughly 0.17% of GDP against about 0.61% in the US, and European late-stage venture funding sits near 10% of US volumes. Companies founded in 2016 were half as likely in Europe as in the US to raise rounds of $50 million or more.

What are governments doing about it?

The European Commission and the EIB have launched the €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund, now managed by EQT, to provide late-stage capital, while the UK runs a government-backed Sovereign AI fund aimed at keeping domestic AI startups scaling at home.