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Last Tuesday, after scrolling on my phone for too long as the news started to show Donald Trump would win the US election, I arrived at Norrsken’s annual Impact Week, held this year at the Swedish foundation’s snazzy beach-front outpost in Barcelona.
The event, focused on impact investing to tackle the world’s biggest problems, offered little respite from the election news. Talk on stage immediately turned to the incoming president.
“There’s now even more urgency to build a European version of things, to build our own ecosystem,” Taavet Hinrikus, cofounder of Wise, told the conference. “One of the biggest concerns I have today is about Ukraine,” he said. Hinrikus’s VC fund, Plural, is a backer of European defence startup Helsing — the type of investment he said becomes more important with Trump returning to the White House.
Chatter away from the stage echoed that sentiment. Investors who last year talked to me about climate tech now spoke about drones. The investors who did mention climate tech did so through the lens of European resilience: startups that can reduce the continent’s dependence on China for critical minerals, for example, rather than reducing carbon emissions.
Danijel Višević, GP at climate fund World Fund, told me off the back of the Trump news the fund “will increase investments in innovation, especially in those that strengthen European resilience”.
It strikes me that, under a Trump Presidency, “impact investing” — a broad definition at the best of times — will become broader. While two years ago impact was tied to climate and health investments, it now seems to include anything that bolsters Europe against external geopolitical threats in an increasingly turbulent world.
Hinrikus summed it up well when he called for a broader definition of impact — one that includes any company that creates wealth for the continent.
“If we build more companies like Wise or Spotify, we boost the GDP of Europe,” he said, citing the impact of Estonia’s burgeoning tech sector on the country’s GDP. He concluded: “GDP in Europe is even more important after today.”
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