In a buzzy bar in chilly Helsinki, Anton Osika declared a bold ambition. “You can build a global AI company from Europe,” Lovable’s co-founder told a cheering crowd, celebrating the first anniversary of his Swedish software start-up’s launch.
The 35-year-old self-declared “nerd” and former particle physicist at Europe’s nuclear research organisation, Cern, certainly has an impressive, if brief, start-up story to tell, even compared with the turbocharged standards of Silicon Valley.
His vibe coding company’s mission to “democratise” software, enabling any user to build their own websites and applications, has rapidly drawn millions of users. Lovable claims 100,000 new projects are being built on its AI-enabled platform every day. Osika’s aim is to create Europe’s first $1 trillion (€864 billion) company.
Lovable’s eye-catching rise speaks to the growing ambition of European tech founders. Over the past decade, the value of Europe’s tech ecosystem has expanded five times to nearly $4 trillion and the region boasts more start-up founders than the US, according to Atomico’s latest State of European Tech report released last week.
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Europe has now created 413 tech companies valued at more than $1 billion.
But despite Europe’s record expansion, the US is surging ahead again. Its giant tech companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet, OpenAI and Meta, are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into developing powerful artificial intelligence models and building vast data centres to capture the future.
Venture capital investors have swallowed the AI happy pill, too. In the first nine months of this year, total private investment in US tech companies rose 95 per cent to $177 billion compared with a 7 per cent increase to $33 billion in Europe against the same period last year.
The extraordinary momentum of the US AI industry was highlighted by stronger than expected quarterly results last week from Nvidia. The robust sales figures boosted the giant chip company’s market capitalisation to $4.5 trillion, exceeding the value of the entire European tech industry.
European politicians are increasingly concerned at the dominance of US companies and are desperate to preserve their own tech sovereignty and boost economic growth. To that end, the European Commission last week announced a raft of measures, known as the digital omnibus, to streamline regulations on cyber security and data, and delay implementation of parts of its landmark AI Act.
But politicians will need to go much further to fuel the capitalist flame in Europe. The urgent needs are to deepen the single market, boost growth capital, help entice more of the world’s best AI researchers to Europe and embrace a more risk-tolerant mindset.
Blueprint
A good blueprint has been provided in a recent paper, The Constitution of Innovation, which argues that Europe should learn from its own successes by replicating the dynamic three decades-long growth spurts in western Europe from 1950 and in eastern Europe from 1990. Few regions can lay claim to two of “the great growth miracles in the past century”, Luis Garicano, Bengt Holmström and Nicolas Petit write.
Arguing that Europe could become the “engine of a new industrial revolution” if it embraces technological change, they urge the European Commission to reverse its “mission creep” and focus on promoting growth and prosperity. They strongly endorse the possible introduction of the 28th regime, allowing European companies to operate under one common corporate regime rather than 27 different ones. They also urge enforcing the single market uniformly instead of more than 270 digital regulators interpreting rules individually.
The dangers of technological dependency on the US have been highlighted by the economist Francesca Bria in an investigation into what she calls the “Authoritarian Stack”. Critical European data, defence and satellite infrastructure is being outsourced to American companies, such as Palantir, Anduril and SpaceX. But these are guided by abrasive tech oligarchs, like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who have attacked democratic institutions or supported far right parties in Europe.
“Europe faces an existential choice: build genuine technological sovereignty now, or accept governance by platforms whose architects view democracy as an obsolete operating system,” Bria writes.
For their part, European tech entrepreneurs do not just want to follow the Silicon Valley playbook but write a new one of their own. Although there is little hope of competing on infrastructure, they still believe there are huge opportunities to use AI to build powerful new financial, industrial, defence, healthcare and service platforms.
On the sidelines of the Slush tech conference in Helsinki, Osika tells me that Lovable has resisted calls to move to the US, like many other European tech companies. In spite of ferocious US competition, he says Europe may be a better place to build tech companies for this new age. Drawing on the region’s collaborative culture can help Lovable become a popular global software platform enabling everyone to create “minimum loveable products”.
But there is also a more defiant spirit in Europe. In the Nordic region they talk about creating a Silicon Valhalla. That determination is summed up by the banner displayed over the entrance to Slush in Helsinki. “Still doubting Europe?” it reads. “Go to Hel.” That welcome defiance deserves more support from Europe’s politicians and investors. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
