Antler Study: Now come the tech founders

Tech founders are coming. These are the results of the study. More than half of founders in Europe come from IT, software or data science backgrounds. Why is this good?

No German Google. There is no definition of Europe. No Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and certainly no Nvidia. There are no European tech giants. You know, it's often discussed as a problem. For example, when it is again said that Series D investors or buyers of technology startups are missing on this side of the world.

It soon seems like a chicken-and-egg problem: there are no European tech giants because there was not, and still is, not enough investment capital for such companies. But according to a study by early-stage VC firm Antler, the real bottleneck may lie elsewhere: with the founders themselves.

Tech founders create tech giants

The report published todayNew tech founders in europe 2024” is an analysis of more than 1,000 founders in Europe and the USA. The authors also examined applications from 60,000 aspiring founders who were looking for a place in the Antler Accelerator in Europe. It shows: in the USA, 100 percent of the founders of the 20 most valuable technology companies Value and 70 percent of unicorn founders have a technical background, i.e. they studied computer science or engineering or have similar training as programmers, were technology executives, software developers or in other technical jobs down the road.

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But in Europe, this percentage has been much lower so far: only 45% of the founders of the 20 most valuable technology companies in Europe are “tech founders,” meaning – as the study’s authors define the term – that they have demonstrable skills and expertise in technology. Computer, software development or data science. Only 26% of European unicorn founders have a technology background.

To make another point: It is also interesting that the authors of the study emphasize that it is the founders of precisely those European startups that are currently most likely to become European tech giants. Mistral, Synthesia, and Pigment have founding teams comprised exclusively of technology founders who also have positions at Google, Meta, and Criteo on their resumes.

The message reads as follows: Technology founders are success founders. And: They do not exist in Europe. or? indeed. That's the positive finding of Antler's study: tech founders are on the rise here too. As of 2023, 54% of founders in Europe have a technology background. The distribution within Europe is uneven; 30% of technology founders come from France, 12% from Germany and 10% from Great Britain.

The study also shows the change in applications for the Antler Residency and participation in the accelerator: the number of aspiring tech founders increased by 300 percent between 2021 and 2023. The number of applications from founders with a background in AI and data increased by 770%, and it is also worth noting that the number of female technology founders increased by 234%.

Because of the crisis: Tech talents become tech founders

Now you can of course ask yourself: what's different, why only now? Antler's study suspects a link between the increase in tech founders and waves of layoffs in the tech sector since 2020. In Europe alone, more than 85,000 tech talent have been laid off after companies went bankrupt in the past three years. It seems that a fair number of people then take the step towards freelancing.

At Antler this was also evident in the applications received during this period: between 2021 and 2023, applications from former employees of European technology companies increased by 3.5 times. More specifically, the number of technical founders coming from these companies increased by 825 percent. People from Deliveroo, Zalando, Gorilla, Klarna and Booking.com have applied for residency at Antler after waves of layoffs there.

Christoph Klink, partner at Antler, sees the interaction between layoffs and the emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence as very promising: “A new generation of tech founders is emerging in record numbers and with more experience than ever before.” Helping Europe's first tech giant may be created in the foreseeable future.

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