The German startup ecosystem is off to a strong start in 2026: Between January and June, 3,053 new startups were founded. This represents a 52 percent increase compared to the second half of 2025 and means more startups were founded than in all of 2024.
How many of those startup’s are one person delivery contract firms, exclusively working for Amazon?
Measuring the number of new startup’s as a success factor is IMHO very stupid. I once started a startup. Starting a startup is not that difficult. Keep that startup running past the five year mark, then you may start to talk about success…
Yes, but for germany this might be a metric for reduced bureucracy. Failing a startup is always easy, but starting a startup in germany might not be trivial.
Otherwise I agree.
Verena Pausder comments: “To create global champions ‘Made in Europe,’ we need a strong European capital market.
She should start a startup to fund startups.
Though the easiest way would be to overvalue a company, e.g. an electric car company, which allows its investors to borrow against the shares and invest that money in new startups.
Unfortunately, Europe doesn’t make it easy to borrow against shares yet. /s
Or one expands typical funding channels. Why do you think that investment is a bad thing?
I don’t think that. This was an attempt at questioning the value of Tesla with a dash of conspiracy theory.
Europe has to expand the channels but the safer laws make it more difficult, which is the right thing. Otherwise we can expect that our banks have to be rescued soon.
Many laws in Europe are not about risk aversion, even though they are perceived like that (and there’s a media obsession with this trope).
Forbidding pension funds from using certain investment types does not reduce long term risk, it only reduces short term risk.
The real problem in Europe is that it ingested neoliberalism much more deeply than one might think. One consequence is that Europe has an ideologically motivated short term investment horizon.
Another consequence of this ideological stringency in Europe is that Europe has subsidies (by GDP) that are about half as big as US subsidies and a fourth of China’s.
Many european countries have a more than twice as large share of outsourced state tasks as the US.
Etc. Etc.
Many laws in Europe are not about risk aversion, even though they are perceived like that
Which laws would you change?
The Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) - Directive 2011/61/EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_Investment_Fund_Managers_Directive_2011
Many laws in Europe are not about risk aversion, even though they are perceived like that (and there’s a media obsession with this trope).
You are right, no mentioning of any problems. What are the problems?
Well, a big problem is that many pension funds cannot invest into firms.
I have mainly been seeing AI and defense companies in the German tech market. Not the kind of companies we need.
Which would you need?
One that builds affordable housing?
That’s a political problem. Most voters don’t want housing to be affordable. Urban development is in the hands of councils mostly.
An AI that can respond and receive fax messages…
Companies focused on digital sovereignty. The EU, both companies and end users, are completely dependent on US software and operating systems. There is a bit of movement around governments using Linux, but there is nothing happening around replacing iOS and Android.
Like memlog? https://www.sprind.org/en/actions/projects/memlog
It competed in a challenge to replace the whole von Neumann architecture.
If I wanted to build any sort of US software competitior, I would go out and claim it is insanely AI to get funding.
You already have iode, /e/, Graphene OS and Jolla. How many other startups do you need? The problem is not lack of software. What is needed is legislation to force compatibility with de-googled phones. It’s up to EU, not startups.
Also, EU needs sovereignty in defense badly. It’s hard to fight American corporations when you still need US to defend you. Defense startups are welcome.
GrapheneOS is leading Android custom rom, but it isn’t a startup and doesn’t support much hardware.
The others are LineageOS based and have weak points when it comes to security, privacy, and frequency updates.
All Android custom roms are still directly tied to Google’s software development (AOSP).
Sailfish OS (Jolla) is Linux based, but is proprietary, so not really an open platform.
So seems like Jolla is the only company really developing an independent mobile OS.
So? You think someone is going to fund a startup and develop a fully independent, fully open source phone OS that will support modern hardware and all the apps stock Android does? Of course not. Jolla, Graphene OS and LineageOS show what a small company can currently do. You also have Ubuntu and Postmarket OS, Fairphone, Murena and couple more. Between them they cover all the niche markets: security, privacy, open-source, Android alternative and independent hardware. No one is investing heavily in them because those markets are really small. New startup trying to develop something from scratch makes no sense.
Exactly!! It’s a government policy and regulatory problem, not a market problem.
Germans are the least trustworthy partners when it comes to military. So no, we don’t need them to create new ways to slaughter their neighbours.
We still don’t have an EU replacement for Visa/MasterCard, Intel/amd, nvidia/amd, but building these takes more than a couple of chatgpt prompts
Germans are the least trustworthy partners when it comes to military.
Why? Because of what happened 60 years ago? Or do you have more recent examples?
60?
- Time flies.
Germany bad!
Germany quietly setting startup records while everyone keeps insisting Europe can’t innovate is pretty funny. The real test comes next though: founding 3,000 companies is great, but if the successful ones still need to move to the US to raise serious growth capital, Germany has only solved half the problem.
Half of these startups are AI experts selling their own snake oil. I would wait after the bubble explode before getting excited
The main issue that Europe tends to have isn’t purely creating new companies, it is scaling them. Because the “single market” is still waaaay too different between countries, because the capital markets are too fractured, and banks have a low risk tolerance, companies can’t scale up nearly as quickly , which is why for example, Spotify is listed in US indices
Absolutely. Europe doesn’t lack ideas or founders: it lacks one deep, liquid capital market. A real Capital Markets Union could let European savings fund European scaleups instead of watching them head to New York for serious growth capital.
It’s honestly more common cultural differences makes companies incapable of scaling outside of the cultures they were created in
Walmart doesn’t exist in Europe. How come?
But if any company manages to scale across all of Europe, they’re commonly able to expand to any location on the globe. The same can’t be said for single national American mega corps.
Walmart doesn’t exist in Europe. How come?
Walmart has a huge variety of products, which are low value dense and need to be restocked a lot. At the same time people are generally price sensitive. Delivering a full truck of a single brand of say frozen pizza to a store is probably overkill. As in it requires a lot of storage space in the store until it is sold. That increases cost. So you need to take in the truck into a distribution centre and then send trucks with all kinds of frozen products to multiple stores. That creates a pretty strong moat. Combine that with culture and branding and it becomes really hard to enter a market.
If you have fewer products to sell, that becomes a lot easier. McDonalds has been able to set up restaurants all over the world. Thanks to having a pretty limited number of products to sell. That is also how German supermarket brands like ALDI and LIDL have been able to conquer most of Europe.
I’m not sure we need megacompanies to corrupt our politics… midsized, sure, but I’m wary of whatever company has the size of Saudi Aramco.
Yes, and then the nice midsized companies will be bought out by bigger American ones.
Don’t allow that. Let them compete.
Artificial intelligence is the key driver of the boom: 1,038 of the newly founded startups have a clear AI focus—more than one in three—and thus more than in all of 2025. The software sector remains by far the strongest industry, with 844 new startups. But the boom is also evident in other fields: Medicine (274) and the food sector (181) are among the sectors with the highest number of new startups—AI applications and related technological advances are also key drivers of development here.
I wonder if the “fake it (with AI) until you make it” will have similar or worse success rate than before AI. Startups sure didn’t wait for AI to produce bullshit.
