Opinion: Europe's VCs must embrace risk – or resign the AI era to US control (thenextweb.com)

An opinion piece argues Europe’s AI startups are losing out not for lack of talent or savings but because local venture capital is too cautious and slow. The EU raises just ~5% of global VC while the US and China capture the lion’s share; households in Europe save €1.4tn annually but little flows to startups. European funds habitually prolong diligence (examples cited: 40-day deals versus Silicon Valley’s week), balk once valuations pass ~$10–15M, and interpret regulation conservatively. The result: fewer growth-stage rounds (Q2 2025 saw $5.7B across 75 European deals — roughly 10% of global late-stage funding), exits below earlier peaks (Graphcore’s ~ $600M sale vs prior $2B valuation), and bankruptcies when follow-on capital dried up (Navya, Uniti). For the AI/ML community this matters because AI and deeptech need heavy upfront capital (notably energy and compute) and investor technical conviction to fund long, uncertain R&D cycles. The piece urges VCs to act with startup speed, make multiple smaller, bold bets, and use flexible structures (SAFEs, convertibles, secondaries, equity-debt hybrids) — especially smaller/mid-sized funds that can avoid institutional inertia. In short: Europe can still build global AI champions, but only if its capital allocators shed conservative norms, accelerate decision-making, and accept the uncertainty inherent to scaling deeptech.