Creating Europe’s most connected tech hubs – Scale Cities Alliance

Instead of competing for an imaginary crown, what if cities join forces to seek startup excellence? Introducing Scale Cities; a collaboration between the public ecosystem builders of 13 European cities, to create Europe’s most connected tech hubs.

To enable data-driven decision-making and unlock network effects, we’re proud to power the Scale Cities Alliance through data and intelligence, with the launch of the Scale Cities ecosystem database, and report.

Decacorn alliance

Lisbon, Porto, Barcelona, Rome, Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Helsinki collectively make up the Scale Cities, which collectively account for seven of the 10 most valuable European tech companies founded since 2000.

Scale Cities startups

Collaboration over competition

There’s long been a level of healthy competition between European tech cities, but in reality the world’s leading tech hubs like the Bay Area and Beijing are currently much further ahead. Through focusing on collaboration rather than competition, the Scale Cities collectively represent a unicorn and future unicorn pool to rival that of Shanghai. In an increasingly distributed world, there’s no reason that knowledge, talent, best practice and capital can’t be shared as easily from Porto to Helsinki, as from San Francisco to San Jose.

Scale Cities unicorns

High-growth and high value

The Scale Cities are on a high-growth trajectory. Startups founded since 2000 in the Scale Cities have created over €350B in enterprise value, growing 3.5x since 2015.

As news crosses the pond of startups and talent fleeing expensive tech hubs, it is open, frictionless ecosystems that have the potential to capitalize. To explore the topic further, join us on 24th Feb for our event on Building tech ecosystems in a distributed world, in collaboration with Scale Cities and Sifted – still time to sign up.