Examples:

Alan—Having already transformed health insurance in France, Alan is now a leading player in Belgium and Spain. With more to come!

Papernest—Easy processes to purchase, switch, and cancel subscriptions are a desperate need for many. Papernest takes the effort and stress out of subscription management.

Pennylane—Business owners and accountants now have a clear picture of their finances and can build better companies – thanks to Pennylane.

Examples:
Gireve—Gireve is a global leader in electric vehicle (EV) recharging, administering more than 500,000 charging points across 35 countries. The team is dedicated to making carbon-free mobility accessible and seamless.

SustainCERT—SustainCERT combines innovative digital technology with sustainability expertise to verify climate impact. It’s a vital tool to validate future action, and prove the effects of climate change on business.

Greenlyte—Carbon capture technology is becoming increasingly vital, not only to reduce but reverse the effects of climate change. Greenlyte’s liquid-sorbent solution removes CO2 from the air, and produces hydrogen as a valuable by-product.

In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess. Just over two decades later, in 2018, Google’s AlphaGo Zero taught itself to play Go in three days, defeating the world champion in 37 moves with a flourish that spectators described as “unhuman”.

By 2023, these impressive AI parlour tricks had been put to serious use, solving the particularly knotty problem of predicting, not only the structure of complex proteins, but the infinitely more complex three-dimensional folds on which their bioactivity depends. The team behind Google’s AlphaFold 2, the program used to do this, picked up the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the achievement.

Today, AI tools can reportedly detect breast cancer six years earlier than traditional screening, with a nearly 10% reduction in false negatives. They act as a second set of eyes for radiologists, making multiple sclerosis diagnoses 44% more accurate and faster. AI is revolutionizing the drug development process, too. Salt Lake City-based Recursion has been able to develop new drugs in weeks at a cost of thousands of dollars in an industry accustomed to spending millions over years. Its models rapidly increase the speed with which new pharmaceuticals and therapeutics can be taken to clinical trials. The company hopes to share clinical data from 10 new drug trials within 18 months—an unprecedented pace.

Beyond healthcare, AI is being used to detect financial fraud, predict floods and drought, create financial forecasts, write software, and increase cybersecurity protections globally, alongside countless applications in retail, logistics, marketing, sales, and entertainment. And while it is still in its relative infancy, the changes to come create significant opportunities for innovation.

Despite these rapid advances, it has become fashionable to compare the whole enterprise of AI to overhyped industries like blockchain, a category which enjoys nowhere near the bandwidth and excitement it once did. In June 2024, experts at MIT and Goldman Sachs published advice predicting “only limited economic upside from AI over the next decade.”

There are also smaller, pan-European digital publications helping to create buzz and showcase entrepreneurs. Sifted, Tech.eu, Silicon Canals, and Maddyness, among others, highlight promising startups, share fundraisers and mergers, and tell local tech stories. These media entities feel like part of the startup scene themselves, because they are. It’s media for, and consumed within, the ecosystem. But for the most part, they haven’t achieved the same mainstream breakthrough enjoyed by Silicon Valley equivalents like WIRED or TechCrunch. Those publications grew out of the San Francisco tech scene of the 1990s and early 2000s respectively and have helped elevate and support the growth of their industries. So far, Europe hasn’t found its equivalent.

The harms resulting from a weakened media industry extend far beyond the tech industry. The European Commission has its own “News Initiative,” recognizing that a “free, viable and pluralistic media environment is key to keeping citizens informed, holding power to account, and strengthening open, democratic societies.” Access to trustworthy information is imperative for European cohesion, particularly as disinformation campaigns grow and people lose faith in institutions.

Tech journalism plays a crucial role in renewing European innovation and growing the economy. Venture capital investment needs compelling narratives, just as public markets follow national sentiment. As WIRED continues to build enthusiasm for American tech, stronger media voices here should provide the thrust behind European innovation.

In the first half of 2024, Russian cyber attacks were reported against the governments of France, Germany, Czechia, as well as the European Parliament and the European Commission. The 2024 Romanian election results were cancelled following massive Russian campaigns of disinformation and influence. China has similarly been blamed for a series of hacks against European lawmakers. Between November 2023 and April 2024, more than 2.25 billion European data records were breached. That figure is so large, it’s almost impossible to truly comprehend. No wonder a May 2024 Politico headline read “Europe under cyber siege in 2024.”

First is education. Organizations need to take cybersecurity seriously, and keep educating team members on both responsible practices and the potential harms from complacency. 82% of European hacks are the result of human behavior or error, and are easily preventable. But the sheer number of attempts and the fatigue factor mean that they’re bound to get through eventually. The majority of attacks today get through via phishing. So companies must work hard to avoid “phishing fatigue.”

Organizations can also enlist the help of hackers themselves to identify weak points. Bug bounties are becoming commonplace, where a cash prize is offered to hackers who can successfully enter a system or network. Security experts also recommend regular “red teaming” – simulated attacks to see how staff and systems respond. German startup Mitigant lets companies emulate attacks on their cloud infrastructure, ensuring that business systems have the best defenses in place.

Italian startup Exein does the same for the notoriously challenging “internet of things” hardware. Connected devices are convenient and fun for users, but they also create hundreds of thousands of entry points for hackers. The result is attacks that can be leveraged across all this different architecture on a huge scale. Exein’s software analyzes and identifies vulnerabilities across whole fleets of tools, and automatically secures them to prevent serious harm.

While the present picture is far from rosy, there are more positive stories to be found in the world of green tech and climate innovation, where swift and intelligent investment may offer cause for hope. Already a US$20 billion industry, green tech is expected to grow nearly tenfold in the coming decade, and early movers have a competitive advantage that won’t last long.

There’s no single solution to this crisis. It requires widespread, fundamental changes to global infrastructure. Hard choices need to be made, and some industries will soon become far less significant, or phase out altogether. This means that the spread of investment opportunities is diverse.

The construction industry, for example, is ripe for reinvention. In Europe it accounts for 35% of all waste produced – some 850 million tonnes annually. To date, no recycling initiatives have been implemented to deal with this at scale. In addition to all the waste, construction faces a twofold problem in manufacturing new materials. First, the production of Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) – humanity’s second most in-demand substance after water – is a heavily polluting process. Carbon emissions from construction materials account for 11% of the global total. Simultaneously, the world is running out of the raw materials used to produce OPC.

But where exactly should investment be directed? There’s a healthy collection of seed and Series A companies finding solutions to precise, urgent issues. They’re making real progress in green steel, energy storage, and carbon capture technology.

Thinking purely about carbon, there are two broad challenges: using less carbon in day-to-day life and business, and reversing the carbon emissions already created.

There are seemingly endless opportunities to innovate for the first. The electric vehicle market has exploded, renewable energy is growing worldwide, and everyday companies are being challenged to track their footprints and make changes.

But it’s the second challenge that requires truly innovative thought. How to launch carbon recapture technology at scale? And what can societies do about the 39% of all carbon emissions that come from our built environment? All require capital-intensive solutions, requiring enormous investment just to bring them to market, long before they can generate revenue or become profitable.

These specific demands do not sit well with private equity, which has grown accustomed to investing in software – an inherently scalable product requiring little investment in physical goods, land, or resources. Certainly software companies like CO2 AI, Greenlyte, and xFarm are already modernizing and improving climate performance in certain industries. But this is an existential issue requiring many more players in the field, and an urgent need for funding models which identify promising post-seed or Series A companies and inject the volume of capital they need. Some of this can come from private equity, but further investment is needed from banks, sovereign wealth funds, and governments.