Brussels wants insurers and pension funds backing European tech. Thirteen have already put their hands up
Banks, insurers and pension funds have signalled they will join a voluntary pact with the European Commission and the EIB Group to channel long-term institutional capital into Europe's growth-stage tech companies — the mechanism behind the 15-billion-euro target already promised.
Thirteen institutional investors — banks, pension funds and insurance companies — have signalled their intent to join a new voluntary pact launched this week by the European Commission and the European Investment Bank (EIB) Group, at the TechEU Equity Summit on 23 September. The goal: channel long-term institutional capital into the venture and growth-capital funds that Europe’s tech companies need to scale up without having to go looking for money — and often relocate — in the United States.
The pact fills in a gap left open in July, when Portugal joined the second phase of the European Tech Champions Initiative (ETCI 2.0) without it being settled how the initiative’s 15-billion-euro target, four times the size of the first 2023 edition, would actually get raised. Two months on, the answer is this: a voluntary commitment from private investors, alongside the member states themselves. The pact also points investors to the European Scale-up Fund, worth 5 billion euros, which serves the same goal.
Two tracks, one target: the 80 billion euros
Neither ETCI 2.0 nor the scale-up fund works alone — both feed the same goal of mobilising up to 80 billion euros in total investment for 1,500 expanding European tech companies, the figure announced when Portugal and the other 26 member states joined the initiative. The EIB had already committed up to 1.25 billion euros of its own funds; what changes now is the door opened to long-term private money, the kind of capital that usually funds pensions rather than startups.
For Portugal specifically, there is no direct news yet: the Commission’s statement does not name any Portuguese institutional investor among the thirteen, and how much the Portuguese state will actually put into the initiative is still unsettled, with a “final size” still promised for the second half of this year. What this pact shows is that Europe is finally building the mechanism — what is still missing is who, from Portugal, takes a seat at the investors’ table.
By Beatriz Mota
Image: Caroline Martin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 igo)
