“Raising a scale-up in Europe is super difficult, because we lack the European instruments, the European venture capital … large enough to support that,” said Enrique Lizaso, CEO of Spanish software company Multiverse Computing, which is crossing quantum-inspired software applications with artificial intelligence.
Multiverse last month raised €189 million in a funding round that included both U.S.-based and European investors.
Lizaso said that if Europe wants to help scale its companies it must be prepared to invest €100 million per company, “which is what you’re going to have from the U.S.”
According to IQM’s Vartiainen, “we would need to have funding levels which are significantly larger than they have been so far.”
In an interview Tuesday, the EU’s tech commissioner Henna Virkkunen said that Brussels and the capitals have jointly funded quantum technology with €11 billion. “Now it’s important, because we are quite fragmented, that we are putting different dots together,” she said.
Picking winners
Both Brussels and EU capitals have rolled out public funding plans to complement private funding, but the industry fears these are insufficient and lack focus.