A host of Europe’s top founders launched “Project Europe” on Wednesday, a new scheme designed to help build Europe’s next €100bn companies.
Founders from some of Europe’s top tech companies — including Klarna, Mistral and Delivery Hero — have signed on to the project.
Led by British podcaster-turned-VC Harry Stebbings of 20VC, Project Europe will invest €200k into 10 to 20 aspiring homegrown entrepreneurs under the age of 25 every year.
The initiative has 150 of Europe’s top founders onboard, Stebbings tells Sifted, and will invest out of a €10m fund.
Each young entrepreneur will be assigned one big European founder — like Andrey Khusid from Miro or Tobias Lutke from Shopify — to work on “solving hard problems with technical solutions.” The fund is being backed by three VCs: 20VC, Berlin-based Point Nine and New York-based Adjacent, as well as those 100+ founders.
“If the Thiel fellowship and YC had a baby, it would be this,” says Stebbings, referring to Peter Thiel’s fellowship which doles out grants to young entrepreneurs, and famed Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator.
In exchange for the money, the fund will receive a 6.66% equity stake in the companies. Stebbings says 10 founders have taken a particularly active role in the project, including Mati Staniszewski at AI synthetic voice startup ElevenLabs and Victor Riparbelli and Steffen Tjerrild of GenAI startup Synthesia.
Project Europe also hired Kitty Mayo, who ran programmes at Entrepreneur First, as CEO.
‘We are in a shit macro situation’
The project comes amid rising geopolitical tensions, with the US’s support for Europe rapidly dissipating under president Donald Trump.
“We've never seen such de-growth in Europe since probably the 70s. We are in a shit macro situation,” Stebbings says. “The world thinks that we can't build great companies anymore.”
Project Europe aims to supercharge growth in startups in Europe: “We have amazing companies here, and we fundamentally need to change the narrative around how we build companies.”
The plan came together rapidly. Stebbings says he came up with the idea three weeks ago, and originally planned to bring 25 founders on. But word spread, and it went from 25 founders to 150 in just three days, he says.
Project Europe will also connect the participants with a community of founders as well as access to events with top entrepreneurs around the world.
Stebbings says there are no co-founder requirements for participants. Project Europe will find entrepreneurs through a mix of outreach from the VCs and founders in their networks as well as inbound applications.
