Why Deep Tech Is Europe’s Future

I think we need to begin with a truth that many business leaders may find painful. When it comes to the digital revolution, I'm afraid to say that Europe has well and truly missed the boat.

Europe is unlikely to build its own Google or Facebook. Nor can we replicate Silicon Valley’s turbo-charged startup culture. This is not because Europe lacks talent or know-how. Rather, Europe has a different way of building companies, and it has made a different strategic choice: up until now we have largely relied on digital infrastructure developed by allies such as the US instead of building our own.

This is what caused Mario Draghi, the former Italian prime minister and president of the European Central Bank, to recently claim that Europe is in the midst of a productivity crisis, and that our reliance on foreign technology poses a serious economic threat.

Fortunately, the emergence of AI and deep tech gives Europe a second opportunity: to reclaim its technological sovereignty and, in doing so, build a more prosperous future for the continent.

Deep tech is different from the software-driven innovation of the last two decades. It’s science-first: AI, biotech, advanced materials, energy systems, technologies grounded in genuine research breakthroughs rather than clever apps. If industrialisation was the first wave of civilisational change, born in the UK, and the internet was the second, built in Silicon Valley, then deep tech is the third. Any ambitious country or region should want to catch that wave. The societal change it brings will be at least as significant as the previous two, and I suspect it will be bigger.

The timing of this second chance matters. Donald Trump’s return has been a wake-up call for European businesses that assumed American support was a given, and it’s forced many to realise that long-term economic and technological strategy cannot be built on the assumption that the transatlantic relationship will always remain predictable. The ship of internet-era sovereignty has sailed. Deep tech is our chance to make sure we don’t miss the next one.

And we are genuinely well-positioned to compete. Europe is a developed, wealthy region, rich not only in capital but in talent, including researchers and scientists who are coming out of some of the best universities in the world. I have seen this firsthand through AI-Stroke, the company I co-founded in France, where we are developing AI technology to help healthcare professionals identify stroke patients earlier, before they reach the hospital. Our experience is just one example of how European research and clinical expertise can be translated into deep-tech companies addressing real-world problems. And this opportunity extends far beyond healthcare. In frontier AI, for example, France is backing Mistral. The UK is doing similar work. Yann LeCun, one of the most senior AI figures at Meta, recently left to build his own company, and much of that new European AI talent is choosing to stay rather than head for the US. If Europe does the right things, we can pull more of that talent home.

McKinsey estimates that deep tech could generate between one and two trillion dollars in enterprise value for Europe by 2030. Of course, forecasts on this scale should be treated with caution. But look at the transformative impact of industrialisation or the internet, and the magnitude of the opportunity becomes clear—even if the precise figure remains impossible to predict.

None of this is guaranteed, though, and there are obstacles. The first is culture. Spend time around Stanford, and it can feel as though almost every other professor has founded or is advising a company. At many of Europe’s leading research universities, that relationship between academia and entrepreneurship is less deeply embedded. The gap is beginning to close, but we need to make it easier and more attractive for researchers to translate their work beyond the lab.

The second is funding. The volume of capital available for innovation and startups in Europe isn’t the same as in the US. That’s not something you fix quickly, so the more useful question is how you mitigate it. The third is pace. Start-ups in the US move far more quickly.  I’m not saying Europe should copy this culture wholesale,  but founders need to at least understand the speed at which the US and China are moving.

Then there’s regulation, where I believe Europe actually has an opportunity to build on its existing strengths. At AI-Stroke, navigating both the European and US regulatory pathways has shown us how much the regulatory environment matters for young healthcare companies. Europe’s strong regulatory standards provide an essential foundation for patient safety and trust, but in our experience, there have been fewer opportunities for early and iterative dialogue. In the US, by contrast, we had several rounds of formal discussions with the FDA, at no cost, which helped us refine our clinical study design while maintaining the rigorous standards expected of a medical device. For a large company, a failed study may be a setback; for a startup working with limited resources, it can be existential.

Europe should not lower the bar for safety or clinical evidence – quite the opposite. Regulators can play an important role in helping innovators understand how to meet that bar, particularly as AI creates new challenges for traditional regulatory frameworks. More structured, early and iterative dialogue could help promising healthcare innovations reach patients safely and efficiently, while preserving the high standards that European healthcare rightly demands.

And this is where Europe’s perceived weaknesses could become a strength. Europe has considerable experience in developing regulatory frameworks and setting standards. If we can strike the right balance between robust oversight and the speed needed for innovation, Europe has an opportunity to help shape how AI – and AI in healthcare in particular – is regulated globally. In that sense, our regulatory expertise could become part of Europe’s competitive advantage.

So what needs to change? Business schools have an important role to play. Too often, students are presented with a narrow set of career paths: investment banking, consulting, perhaps a luxury brand. Few are told that they could co-found a deep-tech medical device company without ever having set foot in medical school. When I first met the three scientists who would become my co-founders at AI-Stroke, they had already spent two years developing the technology and building the dataset. As the project grew, they were looking to complement their scientific and technical expertise with someone who could focus more on fundraising, business development and commercial strategy. That’s when I joined as the fourth co-founder. I’m not a scientist – and that was precisely the perspective I could add.

The current narrative is that scientists need to think more like businessmen in order to take an idea from lab to market. I disagree with that.  What they need is the habit of asking, every time they get a good result: could this be used for something? The fundraising, the storytelling, the commercial structure, is what business graduates are good at. Rather than business-minded scientists, Europe needs better support networks that put scientists and business people in the same room, and business schools that give their students the confidence to walk into that room in the first place.

Europe did not define the internet era, but that does not mean we have to sit out the next revolution. Deep tech gives Europe a second chance to shape its own technological future. We should make sure we don’t miss it.