DG Progress

🇪🇺 More tech workers are now heading to the EU from the US, than vice versa.

The European Dream? 😉

Paris-based AMI Labs enjoyed Europe's largest ever first funding round 🚀

Yan LeCun is building post-LLM "world models" – here in Europe! 🇪🇺

🚀 MERCH HAS LANDED 🚀

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🎉 Reasons to be cheerful about European tech 🎉

🇨🇳 European venture capital spending has overtaken China's; now $85 billion to $53 billion.

🧠 More technology workers are going from the US to Europe than the other way round

💪 Europe is raising more than the US in some deep-tech niches.

The AI startup that has quietly become one of Europe’s most valuable AI companies | Fortune An image generation unicorn in Germany called Black Forest Labs is attracting investments from Nvidia, a16z and Meta.

🌲 Heard of Black Forest Labs?

🇩🇪 Germany's most valuable AI company is a leader in "visual AI", powering the text-to-image features in Grok, Le Chat, Photoshop, and Vibes.

Black Forest Labs aims to define how machines see the world 👇

fortune.com/2026/02/17/...

European VCs join forces to boost flagging biotech investment in the region Heavyweight European venture capital firms like Novo Holdings and Sofinnova Partners have joined together to make the case for more urgently needed funding in the continent's biotech ecosystem. | In an effort to bolster Europe’s biotech venture capital ecosystem, investment firms, research institutions and other stakeholders have launched the European Life Sciences Coalition.

98.5% of the EU's biotech companies that went public last year listed *outside* of the EU 😔

The European Life Sciences Coalition aims to change that 👇

www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/eur...

Check out Arba's letter to the Commission urging the EU to be ambitious with EU-INC

"We [need to] implement EU-INC, so it's easy to open up companies all over Europe, without so much bureaucracy in 27 member states."

👏 MEP Arba Kokalari on the reforms needed for Europe to compete.

@ The Parliament's Tech, Digital, and AI Summit

Dark blue graphic with the European Commission flag logo in the top right and a large white dotted speech‑bubble style box in the center containing the bold blue slogan ‘Stronger business. Stronger Europe.’ on a yellow-accented background.

EU-Inc is coming: a single, straightforward structure for businesses, that works across all EU countries.

What does it mean? ⬇️

"Europe's a digital colony"

Also Europe:

🇪🇺🧠 Europe's ahead in deep tech areas like quantum technology.

Can the EU create an environment that allows its talent to thrive at home?

Mistral seals first acquisition deal with cloud startup Koyeb Koyeb’s three cofounders and 13 employees are expected to join Mistral’s engineering team next month

The surest way for the EU to achieve technological sovereignty is to encourage its own companies to scale up.

🇫🇷 As Mistral AI showed with its acquisition of French cloud startup Koyeb, Europe's big players can provide the capital its startups need.

We need more Mistrals.

sifted.eu/articles/mi...

🇮🇳 🤖 Here's what Europe's AI leaders had to say at last week's Summit:

Macron: AI is a "civilisation-scale" innovation

LeCun: AI could boost productivity by about 0.6% per year, which is "actually quite big!"

Mensch: "The people who are not catching that [AI] wave are going to be left behind"

DG Progress: Driving Europe Forward EU-INC’s moment in Davos, an interview with the movement's co-initiator, and EU simplification initiatives abound

Check out the full interview: dgprogress.eu/p/dg-progre...

Where were you when you heard the European Commission President, Von der Leyen, name-drop the EU, and what’s next for the movement?

"We were actually in our weekly call with the EU-INC team, when one of us in parallel, listened to her speech, and told everyone to hold their thoughts and listen."

Can you talk about the disconnect between what EU companies need and the policy conversation happening in Brussels?

"Where Brussels on one side thinks of studies, policies, regulations, directives and law, entrepreneurs think in products, user adoption and growth."

Where did the idea for EU-INC come from?

"Investing across the EU is currently prohibitive. No one is able to understand all 27 legislative environments, and the likelihood of failure in startups only intensifies the risk of legal “gotcha’s."

🎤 We spoke with Simon Schaefer from Allied for Startups about the EU-INC campaign he co-initiated. Here's what he had to say 🧵

'Europe is the right place to invest' - Special Address by President Ursula von der Leyen at Davos On 20 January 2026, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen shared a special address at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos in Switzerland.'Ge...

EU President Ursula von der Leyen last month at Davos:

🎤 "Too many companies have to look abroad to grow and scale up partly because they face a new set of rules every time they expand into a new member state."

🇪🇺 The solution? "We call it EU-INC."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWF...

Why are European tech founders leaving Europe?

1/ Access to capital
2/ Regulatory environment

Several drivers are interlinked: a nimbler business environment attracts capital, customers, and talent.

www.stateofeuropeantech.com/

Two graphs from Dealroom that tell Europe's story.

🦄 1/4 of the world's unicorn founders are European, but 4/10 end up in the US because that's where over 1/2 of the world's VC money is.

We have the talent. Now we need an environment that investors want to bet on 🚀

Data put together by x.com/World_Data_...

🤯 Europe accounts for over half of global industrial robotics exports.

💡 14/20 countries with the highest "robot density" are European

🚗 Deep industrial capacity across automotive, machinery, plastics, F&B

🇪🇺 4/5 world's largest exporters are European (Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden)

OpenAI hires OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger The viral open source project enables users to create personal AI agents

🇦🇹 Founder of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger, is joining OpenAI.

🇪🇺 Described by OpenAI's chief Sam Altman as a "genius," Peter is proof that the EU has AI talent.

➡️ We need to focus now on creating an environment that allows EU talent to compete at home.

www.ft.com/content/45b...

EU–INC — One Europe. One Standard. — Pan-European legal entity. EU–INC is a proposal for a pan-European standardized legal entity to unlock pan-European startup scaling.

Heard of EU-INC? Here's what it is:

🚀 A movement to make life easier for European companies to scale

💡 Entrepreneurs should be able to incorporate a business once be recognised everywhere

🇪🇺 28th regime could provide a single portal for founders to set up a business < 48hrs

www.eu-inc.org/

Trade Union Chief Warns EU–INC a "Dead End" for Startups

The Dead End:

Mistral boss calls for European unity in AI race, as pledges €1.2bn Swedish data centre investment The Mistral CEO said Europe needed to think of itself as a unified market.

CEO Arthur Mensch drops the latest on Europe's AI champion:

🔥 20x revenue growth

📈 €11.7bn valuation

🇸🇪 €1.2bn investment in Sweden data centre

tech.eu/2026/02/11/...

Two framed portraits hang side by side; one depicts a saintly figure with a halo, the other shows a modern man in monk attire.

Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta will be at the Competitiveness Summit in Belgium tomorrow.

Praise be.

DG Progress: Driving Europe Forward EU-INC’s moment in Davos, an interview with the movement's co-initiator, and EU simplification initiatives abound

Check out our first edition 👇
dgprogress.eu/p/dg-progres...