“Then people don’t know if they have a French business or an American business,” Yared said. “All of the talent that grew his business—and he’s not alone—stayed” in the U.S.
“It’s almost a foregone conclusion that they’re going to then move to New York, San Francisco, Austin—and they’re going to start bringing their commercial leaders out there,” Fletcher said. “One of the disadvantages or gaps [in European AI development] is just that ability to have the scaling leaders that can take you all the way from early stage all the way through IPO.”
Hulme said another problem is that these universities aren’t graduating enough students each year to keep up with demand.
“If you just look at roboticists and computer scientists graduating from Imperial and Oxbridge, it’s only about 500 a year. It’s kind of farcical,” Hulme said. “The demand is an order of magnitude more than that.”
And then, much of that talent ends up moving to the U.S., Fletcher noted, and it’s important to “keep and contain that talent here in Europe.”
To put it in perspective, Lim said, the AI startup ecosystem in Europe is just about 15% to 20% the size of Silicon Valley.
“We’ve had less of these success stories come through, and that’s where great growth talent generally comes from,” Lim said. It “comes from successful scale-ups and successful companies that have gone through the path of hyper growth and then through IPO.”
However, Yared said the tune at VCs in Europe is starting to change.
“Now the tune is [that] you can build a global winner from Europe—and if that happens enough times—you get these tribes of people who actually have the talent and have seen it,” she said. “That grows not only their companies, but the next companies that they go into and found.”
