Europe’s capital drought may be coming to an end.
Scaleup Europe, a new €5B fund created by the European Commission, announced this week that it completed its first investment—co-leading ICEYE’s €450M Series F, announced in June, which reached €1B+ in total investment after secondary placements.
The investment signifies a new era for Europe, one in which the region is better equipped with the capital necessary to fund its own growth-stage ventures.
History lesson: The Scaleup Europe Fund was announced in 2025 as part of the EU Startup and Scaleup Strategy, which aims to remake the region’s regulatory and financial landscape to support growth in local deep-tech industries.
While the fund’s first investment supported the space industry, its scope is much broader—with managers exploring future investments in adjacent high-tech industries including AI, robotics, semiconductors, energy, biotech, and advanced industrial systems.
Despite the wealth of deep-tech talent in Europe—and the growing pool of startups focused on strategic, capital-intensive industries—access to growth financing has often remained out of reach.
In 2025, for instance, European investors did not lead a single growth-stage investment round in Europe’s space industry. The lack of late-stage financing options has forced many startups to look abroad for large capital raises, and exit opportunities often involve selling to a foreign buyer.
Scaleup Europe Fund representatives are hoping to solve this growth-stage financing gap, and ultimately help European companies to remain in Europe as they mature.
Meet the fund: The European Commission has agreed to contribute €1B to the Scaleup Europe Fund, which will receive the rest of its financing from big names across the continent, including Novo Holdings, the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark, CriteriaCaixa, Santander, Wallenberg Investments, Mouro Capital, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Dutch pension fund ABP, and Allianz.
In May, the European Innovation Council selected EQT—a global investment firm headquartered in Sweden with €291B in assets under management—to lead the fund. EQT will decide on the investments, and will provide Scaleup Europe funding to companies seeking €100M+.
“This is about more than capital. It’s about helping strengthen the broader European technology and life-sciences ecosystem by connecting founders with long-term capital, industrial partnerships, talent, infrastructure and global networks,” officials from EQT said in a joint statement in May. “Most importantly, it’s about raising ambition and helping more European companies become global category leaders.”
Do the math: The Scaleup Europe Fund comes at the perfect moment to satisfy Europe’s money-hungry space industry, but it’s unclear how much of the fund will be directed to space scale-ups. EQT did not outline how much it planned to invest in the space industry compared with other deep-tech sectors, and did not respond to Payload’s request for comment.
The €5B total might seem like a gargantuan sum. It dwarfs other efforts in Europe to increase the pool of capital available to startups—namely, the European Commission’s European Innovation Council STEP Scale Up initiative which provides up to €30M to deep-tech startups. However, it may not be enough to build a robust, globally competitive space industry.
At most, the €5B fund can be spread across 50 different €100M rounds. Given Scaleup Europe’s broad remit, European space startups must now compete for EQT’s attention against other, equally pressing strategic technologies.
And when it comes to growth-stage financing in the space industry, €100M doesn’t go as far as one might hope.
This year alone, multiple global space startups closed $500M+ (~€435M+) funding rounds, including ispace, True Anomaly, and K2 Space. If Europe is trying to compete on a global scale, a €5B fund is a good place to start.
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