Can Euronext Provide the Exit Market Europe’s Scale-Ups Need?
Europe is building larger growth funds. But without liquid public markets, its most successful technology companies may still list—or be sold—elsewhere.
STRATEGIC BRIEFING | Europe is learning to finance companies beyond the start-up stage. The harder test comes later. When founders, employees and growth investors eventually require liquidity, can Europe offer a public market capable of carrying its technology companies into global maturity?
Europe’s scale-up debate is usually presented as a shortage of capital. That diagnosis is increasingly incomplete.
The European Commission has selected EQT to lead the proposed €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund, while the EIC STEP Scale Up programme can invest between €10 million and €30 million in strategic technology companies. European institutional investors are beginning to participate in larger growth vehicles.
Growth capital determines whether a company can scale. Exit infrastructure helps determine where its value ultimately remains.
A financial layer that was once visibly absent is slowly being constructed. But growth capital is not the final destination. It is a bridge.
The other half of the growth cheque
The tension became unusually explicit in a recent response from Nuno Sebastião, co-founder and CEO of Portuguese financial-technology company Feedzai.
Europe, he argued, has learned to write seed and Series A cheques. It has not yet learned to write the €200–500 million growth cheque—or built an exit market that makes writing one rational. The two weaknesses reinforce each other.
A growth investor does not evaluate a €300 million investment solely by examining technology, customers and expansion potential. The investor must also consider who might eventually acquire the stake, where the company could list, what valuation a public market might provide and whether sufficient liquidity will exist afterwards.
If the most credible answer remains New York, American capital gains an advantage long before an IPO takes place.
Europe does not lack promising companies. It lacks a continuous financial pathway from innovation to mature public ownership.
The absence of a credible European IPO alternative also affects companies that never reach a stock exchange. A realistic public-market valuation gives founders and investors leverage during private acquisition negotiations. Without it, selling to an international technology group or private-equity fund may become the only credible route to liquidity—and may happen earlier than the company’s industrial development would otherwise justify.
Europe may finance the company privately, while its expected exit still pulls ownership and strategic gravity across the Atlantic.
Europe already has a technology exchange
This is not a story about Europe lacking stock exchanges. Euronext describes itself as Europe’s leading venue for technology listings. Its markets host close to 700 listed technology companies, representing more than €1.6 trillion in aggregate market capitalisation at the end of April 2026. Its more selective Euronext Tech Leaders segment includes 113 companies across software, fintech, biotech, electronics and defence.
The exchange also has a substantial pipeline. Its 2026 IPOready programme brought together more than 160 private companies from 22 countries. Collectively, they generate €29 billion in annual revenue and employ 140,000 people. Almost seven in ten operate in technology-related sectors. Since 2015, more than 1,300 companies have participated in the programme.
Those figures demonstrate that Europe does not lack potential issuers or formal market infrastructure.
The more difficult question is what happens after the bell rings. A listing creates access to a market. It does not automatically create the market a company needs.
Listing is not the same as liquidity
For a global scale-up, the choice of exchange is not ceremonial. It affects valuation, analyst coverage, trading volumes, access to specialised investors and the ability to raise additional capital after listing.
New York’s advantage is not simply that more money is available. Its markets combine deeper pools of specialised technology investors, denser analyst coverage, stronger retail participation and benchmarks that automatically direct global capital towards listed technology companies.
Together, these features improve price discovery and can sustain valuations that European venues struggle to reproduce consistently. Governance also influences the choice.
An exchange can provide the machinery of a market. Only investors can provide its depth.
Founders may want to raise public capital without immediately surrendering strategic control. Multiple-vote share structures can offer that protection. Europe’s Listing Act begins to reduce differences between Member States, but implementation remains incomplete and its harmonised framework initially focuses on multilateral trading facilities rather than every major regulated market.
Europe is moving, but founders still encounter a less uniform governance landscape than the idea of one European market suggests.
Euronext can provide listing venues, trading technology and connections to investors. It cannot by itself harmonise company law, tax systems, pension mandates or every part of Europe’s post-trading infrastructure.
Europe has built a cross-border exchange operator inside a financial system that still does not consistently behave as one market.
The 700-company paradox
Euronext’s nearly 700 listed technology companies demonstrate real scale. They should not, however, be mistaken for 700 European equivalents of the largest American technology platforms.
The category spans different sectors, company sizes and stages of maturity. Its existence proves that Europe can bring technology companies to market. It does not settle whether European exchanges can consistently provide the deepest liquidity and most competitive valuations for the next generation of global scale-ups.
IPOready reveals a similar distinction. By the end of 2025, more than 1,200 companies had participated in Euronext’s pre-IPO programmes, while 38 had completed listings and raised more than €1.7 billion at admission.
This is not a failure rate. IPOready prepares companies to understand capital markets; it does not require every participant to list. But the distance between a large pipeline and a relatively narrow flow into public markets remains instructive.
Europe is getting better at preparing companies for the market. It is less clear that it has made the market compelling enough for them to enter.
Who will own Europe’s scale-ups?
Behind Euronext stands an even larger question: who will own Europe’s technology companies once they become public?
European households hold enormous wealth through pension funds, insurers, savings products and investment funds. Yet benchmark structures and global investment mandates frequently direct their technology exposure towards established American companies.
The problem is not that European pension funds refuse to invest in technology. Many already do so extensively—but often through global indices dominated by the largest US platforms.
Redirecting this capital cannot mean asking pension funds to make concentrated or politically motivated investments. Their obligations require diversification, liquidity and disciplined risk management.
But diversified access to a deeper group of mature European technology companies is a different proposition. Stronger indices, specialist funds, analyst coverage and institutional mandates could make European technology more investable without confusing strategic ambition with financial safety.
A European IPO must be a rational financial choice—not an act of economic patriotism.
Euronext as infrastructure
This is the institutional gap identified from different directions by Enrico Letta and Mario Draghi: innovative companies operate inside a European single market that remains incomplete precisely where capital, ownership and scale must cross borders.
European leaders have since made better financing and exit options for scale-ups an explicit capital-market priority.
Euronext increasingly presents itself not merely as an exchange, but as part of the infrastructure of a European Savings and Investments Union. It connects listing, trading, clearing, settlement and custody, while working to consolidate parts of Europe’s post-trading landscape.
ESMA and the European Commission are also moving towards more harmonised supervision and greater market transparency.
If New York remains Europe’s most credible exit, American capital begins shaping European companies long before they cross the Atlantic.
One concrete step is the European Consolidated Tape. In December 2025, ESMA selected EuroCTP to develop a consolidated view of trading in shares and exchange-traded funds across European venues.
The tape will not manufacture liquidity. But it can make fragmented liquidity more visible, improve price discovery and allow investors to experience European trading activity less as a collection of separate national markets. These measures may sound technical. They determine whether capital can actually behave as European capital.
Euronext is therefore both part of the solution and a test of its limits. It may be able to integrate the machinery of the market faster than Europe can integrate the capital and institutional behaviour surrounding it.
The Feedzai test
There is no public indication that Feedzai is preparing an IPO or selecting a listing venue.
That is not the point.
Feedzai can be used as a non-speculative stress test. It is European-founded, globally active, valued at more than $2 billion and embedded in critical financial infrastructure.
Imagine that a company with those characteristics first required a €300–500 million investment and later considered entering public markets.
Could a European fund provide the growth cheque? Could Euronext offer sufficient liquidity, visibility and specialist investors? Could European pension and investment funds become long-term shareholders? Could the company use its listed shares to finance international acquisitions? And could it obtain a valuation that made remaining European compatible with management’s obligations towards employees and investors?
If every answer depends on a different national institution, programme or policy initiative, Europe may possess all the necessary components without yet possessing a functioning system.
The market after the fund
Europe is right to address its shortage of late-stage growth capital. Larger funds are necessary. Public guarantees and institutional participation can help investors carry risks that fragmented markets currently avoid.
But success cannot be measured only by the number of cheques written. It must also be measured by what happens when portfolio companies mature.
If Europe finances companies until they are valuable enough to list in New York or be acquired by a foreign platform, it will have strengthened those companies without necessarily strengthening its own financial system.
If growth capital leads into liquid European public ownership, the same investment can help build a durable industrial and capital-market ecosystem.
Euronext already has the exchange infrastructure, hundreds of listed technology companies and an expanding pre-IPO pipeline.
The question is whether Europe can connect them to enough capital to create a true exit market.
Europe does not merely need funds capable of financing its scale-ups. It needs a market capable of keeping them European after those funds have done their work.
Credit
AI-generated editorial illustration by Altair Media.
Caption
New York and Europe compete for the same generation of technology companies. Euronext already provides substantial market infrastructure, but Europe must still connect growth capital, liquidity and institutional ownership into a credible pathway from scale-up to public company.
