Wall Street loves a good acronym.
There was FAANG, the term popularised by TV host and investor Jim Cramer in 2013 to describe Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.
More recently, some in Silicon Valley have sought to popularise “MANGOS” (Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI and SpaceX) as the AI boom heeds another paradigm shift.
These kinds of labels are by their nature a bit silly.
Arbitrary and imperfect as they may be, however, they perform an important function: spinning disparate threads into a coherent narrative, which might explain why Europe has thus far failed to come up with a similar initialism of its own. That's why I propose BRIOCHE.
BRIOCHE is an all-star European acronym consisting of Bolt, Revolut, Iceye, Oura, Celonis, Helsing and ElevenLabs. This pastry may be a little unwieldy, but take a bite and you might be left feeling pleasantly surprised.
Sectors and geographies
Unlike FAANG, which largely represented a handful of companies clustered around California, BRIOCHE is a continental affair. Its constituent parts stretch from Estonia to Germany, Finland to the UK, spanning sectors as varied as mobility, defence, enterprise software, AI and wearables.
Bolt has built a mobility platform spanning dozens of countries. Revolut has become one of Europe's few truly global consumer technology brands. Iceye has become a critical player in satellite intelligence at a time when sovereign capabilities suddenly matter again.
Oura dominates one of the most successful consumer wearables categories. Celonis has quietly become one of Europe's most valuable software companies. Helsing sits at the heart of the region’s rapidly expanding defence technology ecosystem. ElevenLabs has emerged as one of its breakout AI stars.
One obvious omission is French AI darling Mistral. Synthesia is missing. One could also make a case for Spotify, SAP or Wayve. Their absences aren’t an oversight so much as the brutal constraints of amateur acronym engineering, and Europe now having so many credible contenders.
Oura might be the most awkward inclusion in BRIOCHE, not least because the Finnish-founded wearable company now maintains a significant presence in the US. But Europe’s most successful tech companies have rarely stayed neatly within its borders.
Small beginnings
In some ways, Europe has become too accustomed to viewing tech success through an American lens.
Companies only become worth celebrating once they have achieved trillion-dollar valuations and near-monopolistic dominance.
But people forget how modestly some of America's giants once appeared.
When Amazon went public in 1997, it was an online bookseller valued at little over $400m. Netflix spent years mailing DVDs to subscribers before becoming synonymous with streaming. Google was "just" a search engine. Facebook was once dismissed as a social network for college students. None of these companies looked inevitable at the outset.
FAANG was a retrospective label that helped investors make sense of trends already underway. Perhaps Europe should learn from that. One of Silicon Valley's greatest advantages has always been its ability to manufacture confidence.
Europe, by contrast, has developed a habit of waiting until its companies become indisputable global champions before allowing itself to get excited. By this point, it is often too late. The founders have moved to the US, the late-stage investors are in California and the companies themselves increasingly operate according to American rules.
Of course, BRIOCHE is hardly perfect, and I don’t expect my attempt at a pithy acronym to catch on.
But for the first time in a long time, Europe's problem is no longer that it has too few technology champions to choose from. And waiting until companies become trillion-dollar giants before treating them as world-beaters is a habit worth ditching.
By then, someone else will almost certainly be claiming them as their own.
