The figures are known, and despite multiple positions taken, little challenge from politicians. Repetition is therefore necessary and let us recall again that European pension funds currently manage more than 3,000 billion euros in assets, and less than 0.05% of this sum is invested in venture capital, while in the United States, pension funds allocate up to 15% of their portfolios to it.
The result is that the profits generated by European startups, those that we finance, train and subsidize, are captured by American investors. Thus, each European unicorn financed by foreign funds represents a share of value creation which escapes Europeans and finances Californian pensions, while European savers remain confined to low-yielding investments.
The problem is not a lack of capital, but of allocation. Europe has the most abundant savings in the world, but these remain tied up in public debt, institutional real estate and even sovereign bonds. So many assets that secure the present, but do not build the future.
If European pension funds allocated even 1% of their assets to venture capital, 30 billion euros would be available each year to finance the continent’s strategic technologies, the equivalent of three Horizon Europe programs entirely dedicated to business growth, and this without creating a single new tax.
The reluctance of European pension funds is due to a risk culture misaligned with innovation cycles which leads asset managers to prefer accounting stability to strategic volatility. Prudential frameworks, whether Solvency II, IORP II, etc., reinforce this aversion and mechanically penalize unlisted assets, while compressing risk-taking within narrow regulatory corridors.
Venture capital should not be presented as speculation, but as a source of diversification and long-term return which makes it possible to finance real assets: companies, patents, jobs, factories, strategic technologies.
Especially since the question of financing startups is inseparable from that of economic sovereignty: how can we claim to defend a technologically and energetically independent Europe if its own innovations are financed and promoted elsewhere?
Some countries have already understood this logic and are showing that it is possible to combine institutional prudence and support for innovation. Thus the Netherlands and Sweden allocate several billion euros to venture capital via their pension funds, while Canada and Norway have made unlisted investment a pillar of their investment policy.
As long as European pension funds do not invest in their own companies, Europe will continue to finance the growth and pensions of other continents. The day it redirects its savings towards the innovation it creates, it will stop exporting its value, and will finally begin to capitalize on its future.
