Stop chasing the American dream: Why Europe needs its own accelerator playbook

 

With Techstars hitting pause on its Berlin and Paris programs, the future of accelerators in Europe is up for debate. In this timely opinion piece, Sven De Cleyn — our imec.istart Program Director — argues it’s time to stop chasing the Silicon Valley model and build a European playbook that turns fragmentation into strength. With active hubs in Italy and the Netherlands — and more on the way — imec.istart is putting this vision into practice.

 

Instead of copying Bay-Area blueprints, Europe should back a distinctly European, pan-continental accelerator approach that stitches our diverse hubs into a single innovation fabric.
 

European tech startup founders often aspire to get into renown U.S. accelerator programs like Y Combinator or Techstars. There is no doubt these accelerators have spawn high-value companies and created massive impact on a wide variety of industries.  Many examples like Conveo or Lovable showcase the rapid acceleration EU startups can enjoy by participating in U.S. accelerators. It will undoubtedly provide them with a unique experience ‘on steroids’ to learn and do business in the U.S. So, from a startup perspective, it should not be an or-or discussion. But this doesn’t mean we should copy-paste the U.S. accelerator formulas into the European continent. The structural realities of Europe’s market, culture and capital base make that a seductive – but ultimately wrong – idea.

 

 

A different market geometry

 

Even if the size of the home markets situates themselves in the same order of magnitude – the United States counts around 330 million people, whilst the EU27 market reaches a 450 million inhabitants in size – the nature of both markets is fundamentally different. The U.S. is more or less a one-regulation, one-language sandbox home to 139 of the world’s 500 largest companies in 2024, counted by revenue according to the Fortune Global 500 list. Europe on the other hand is a mosaic of 27 legal regimes, languages and tax codes, home to 83 of the world’s 500 largest companies in 2024. What looks like a single addressable market on a pitch deck is, in practice, a jigsaw for experts. 

The challenges for Europe are known for quite a while and remained largely untackled for an extended period of time. However, I’m an optimist by nature – I believe optimism is a moral duty when working in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. It seems stars align for the European continent to define an own accelerator blueprint, fully based on European standards to maximize impact for some of the greatest technologies developed by and in Europe. Based on learnings from their U.S. counterparts but spiced with European flavours.

 

 

The well-known hurdles

 

U.S. accelerators thrive on speed and homogeneity – the ability to push dozens of startups through the same Delaware-C-corp paperwork and into a single demo-day investor pool. Europe’s fractured terrain demands slower, more customised playbooks: expertise in local compliance, talent visas, and multilingual go-to-market paths. Cookie-cutter acceleration leaves founders stranded at the very moment they need help knitting markets together.

In general, Europeans tend to be more risk averse. This certainly shows in the availability of Venture Capital (VC) funding. Crunchbase puts 2024 European VC funding at $51 billion – just 16 % of global venture dollars, and less than half the continent’s 2021 peak. In comparison, VC funding for their U.S. counterparts surpassed $200 billion. Big late-stage rounds fuelled by European investors remain scarce, while U.S. mega-rounds soar. American accelerators bank on giant follow-on rounds to validate their equity stakes, whilst Europe’s thinner capital pools make that calculus riskier. The U.S. model only works well if valuations for these investment rounds go through the roof. Size and valuations in European companies have been known to be more modest. Prior academic research has shown that slightly underfunded businesses realize better outcomes, yet the gap in funding between equivalent U.S. and European tech startups remains too significant. 

 

 

Why the U.S. model travels poorly

 

The disparity between U.S. accelerators and their success with EU startups shows up in different ways. Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 cohort composition accepted only 9 European companies out of 143 (6%). If one of the world’s most famous accelerator struggles to pipeline European deals, it is a sign the unit economics and the value proposition need localisation.

Techstars has operated in Europe for a decade, yet recent headlines tell a sobering story. The Stockholm accelerator was shut down mid-programme in 2023 after just 1½ weeks, with founders offered their equity back to soften the blow. About a year later, Techstars paused its flagship Berlin programme (operated since 2015), citing cost and complexity, and corporate partners from Oslo to Seattle have pulled support amid internal restructurings. Recently, Techstars also announced to pause its Paris programme, which it operated since 2018.

These retrenchments reveal a mismatch between a centralised, growth-at-all-costs accelerator strategy and Europe’s distributed, relationship-driven ecosystems. When an outfit built on global scale can’t make the numbers work in some of Europe’s most mature hubs, startup founders should ask whether the recipe itself is compatible with European ingredients.

 

 

A momentum for Europe

 

Far from being a weakness, Europe’s diversity is a strategic asset when harnessed correctly. The European continent is home to a multitude of fertile breeding grounds in a wide array of technologies and industries. Ranging from clusters like semiconductors in the BeNeLux – at a European level significantly accelerated currently through the EU Joint Chips Undertaking –, fintech in London and Amsterdam, climate-tech hotbeds in the Nordics, mechatronics know-how in Southern Europe and biotech hubs in the BeNeLux or Switzerland each offer specialised talent and industry links. They are home to some of Europe’s most promising technologies. Large amounts of highly skilled and talented engineers and scientists in Eastern Europe provide another vast pool of untapped potential. 

What is missing is connective tissue: an accelerator that connects founders through multiple hubs, helps to embrace the colourful palette of European business cultures, teaches “regulatory literacy” for each market, and brings investors from Lisbon to Tallinn onto the same cap table. Europe’s patchwork can become a competitive moat – localised products in fintech, health-tech or mobility often need national compliance anyway – but only if founders can access pan-European networks as effortlessly as YC founders tap Sand Hill Road. And if more hurdles on a truly single investment market, international mobility of talented people or national certifications are removed – a voice the current European Commission has clearly heard and understood, e.g. through their recent EU Startup & Scaleup Strategy or their initiatives on the EU Savings and Investments Union.

I can be called overly optimistic or naïve, but I honestly believe more and more Europeans have come to a sound understanding Europe should not blindly copy the very successful U.S. accelerators models, but translate some of its most fundamental concepts to European realities. At imec.istart, we’ve seen firsthand how cross-border cooperation can accelerate promising tech startups. The European accelerator jigsaw could lead to a multi-hub accelerator locally anchored, exposing startup founders to a variety of cultures and regulations, grasping the opportunities for blended financing options from the different national and European funding schemes such as EIC and building better connectivity between the various hotspots across the continent. 

Then, and only then, European accelerators will be able to significant increase the impact of their alumni to levels worthy of the impressive talent and creativity European entrepreneurs and technologists possess and turn an apparently competitive disadvantage into a key driver for (more) global impact. I’d be more than happy to engage in conversations with like-minded people to make this vision happen... This vision is obviously not new, but the momentum we currently experience at imec.istart provides clear proof points that boost our confidence for executing on this vision.