Forging Europe’s Future from Helsinki to the Global Stage
The MedTech Innovation 2025 Helsinki Summit is positioned as a premier strategic event designed to accelerate European medical technology from its foundational scientific breakthroughs to tangible global patient impact.
By bringing together a curated assembly of innovators, strategic investors, and critical regulatory experts, the summit serves as a vital catalyst for the European health innovation ecosystem. The agenda is meticulously crafted to address key challenges and opportunities, with a focus on continuous and preventive healthcare, optimizing the research and innovation landscape, ensuring streamlined market access, and ultimately boosting the uptake of new technologies in health and biopharma.
In this strategic context, the EIC Scaling Club plays an important role as a partner, serving as a practical case study and a positive example of success that can support the summit’s broader mission.
The club’s participation, highlighted by dedicated pitching sessions for companies working on “New Biotech Platforms” and “Cardiovascular Therapies,” provides a direct, concrete example of how the EIC successfully cultivates and scales deep tech ventures. This report moves beyond a simple announcement to offer a deep, analytical look at the strategic implications of the EIC Scaling Club’s recent €1.2 billion fundraising milestone. It is an achievement that firmly positions the club’s model as a pivotal force in shaping Europe’s deep tech landscape.
The Acceleration of Capital – A New Benchmark for European Deep Tech
A new and compelling benchmark for the European deep tech ecosystem was set at the EIC Scaling Club Ambition Forum in Riga, Latvia, where Stéphane Ouaki, Acting Director of the European Innovation Council & SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA), announced a monumental milestone: the EIC Scaling Club’s 120 deep tech scaleups have collectively raised over €1.2 billion in funding since joining the programme. This figure is a powerful validation of the EIC’s strategic vision to make Europe a leader in future-shaping technologies, thereby becoming more competitive, sustainable, and secure. It is a clear signal that Europe’s most promising innovators are successfully attracting significant backing from both the private and public sectors.
Upon closer analysis, the data reveals an extraordinary acceleration in fundraising velocity. The collective €287.6 million raised by the companies in 2024 served as a strong start, but it was the dramatic surge to over €910.6 million in 2025 that demonstrates a critical inflection point. This is not a linear progression; it represents a parabolic growth curve that suggests the programmatic efforts of the EIC Scaling Club have reached maturity and are creating a powerful flywheel effect.
The initial funding in 2024 likely represented early-stage support and foundational capital. However, the subsequent, rapid acceleration in 2025 points to a system where targeted networking events, such as the biannual gatherings that facilitate 1:1 meetings with investors, are culminating in larger and more frequent funding rounds. This exponential growth proves that the program is not just a source of initial capital, but a catalyst that de-risks investments for a broader pool of private capital, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle of success.
A nuanced breakdown of the two cohorts within the club further illustrates this strategic, long-term approach to value creation. The first cohort, which joined in April 2024, has demonstrated exceptional financial growth, experiencing a 58.27% increase in funding since joining and reaching a median of €22.34 million per funding round. The second cohort, which joined six months later, has been focused on a different, yet equally crucial, metric: team growth. They have expanded their teams by 27.7%. These metrics are not in contradiction; rather, they reflect the different stages of a venture’s lifecycle and the EIC’s staged impact.
While the first cohort has had the time to convert its foundational growth into tangible, large-scale funding, the second is still building the operational infrastructure necessary to absorb and execute on future capital raises. This approach shows the EIC Scaling Club’s commitment to helping companies mature from promising ideas into robust, scalable organizations that are highly attractive to serious public and private investors.
Mapping the Innovation Frontier – Sectoral Deep Dives and Landmark Deals
The EIC Scaling Club’s success is not uniform but is strategically concentrated in sectors that are defining the future of technology and society.
The impressive performance of these capital-intensive, science-based sectors is a powerful testament to the proven efficacy of the EIC Scaling Club’s model. The success in areas like Next-Gen Computing and Renewable Energies demonstrates that the EIC has perfected a process for attracting and facilitating large-scale, private capital for complex technologies.
The Helsinki summit is the strategic venue to apply this proven formula specifically to the critical health and medtech sectors, providing investors and innovators with the confidence that the EIC’s framework can deliver similar results in their domain. The dedicated pitching sessions on “New Biotech Platforms” and “Cardiovascular Therapies” at the summit serve as a direct bridge between this broad success and the event’s curated focus.
The stories behind the largest funding deals further underscore the transformative nature of this capital injection. Multiverse Computing, a Spanish quantum software company, raised a staggering €256 million in 2025 across two separate rounds. This signals massive investor confidence in a nascent but high-potential frontier technology, proving that Europe is now capable of funding truly ambitious, paradigm-shifting ventures at scale. Similarly, Axelera AI from the Netherlands secured €61.6 million in 2025, complementing a previous €58.6 million in 2024, to advance its AI-native hardware and software platform. This sustained funding trajectory demonstrates ongoing investor interest in the fundamental components of the AI revolution.
Other significant deals highlight the application of deep tech to tangible, real-world challenges. Aerones, a Latvian company, secured €53.4 million in 2025 for its robot-enabled wind turbine maintenance services, showcasing how robotics can be applied to industrial and sustainable solutions. Endurosat from Bulgaria raised €43 million to make satellite and space missions universally accessible, with a vision to “transform the complex satellite industry into a streamlined data service”. This signals a new era where Europe is funding ventures that seek to democratize access to foundational technologies. Finally, H2Site from Spain raised €36 million to develop patented technology for high-purity hydrogen separation, a key enabler for the green energy transition.
The nature of these large deals—in quantum computing, AI hardware, robotics, space, and hydrogen—directly challenges the long-held narrative that Europe lacks the “patient capital” required for capital-intensive deep tech ventures. It shows that European investors are now willing and able to write the multi-million-euro checks needed to build these complex businesses, thereby closing a historic funding gap.
The EIC Scaling Club as an Ecosystem Accelerator
The remarkable success of the EIC Scaling Club is the direct result of a deliberate, well-structured program. The club’s model is predicated on programmatic mechanisms designed to accelerate growth, most notably through biannual networking events that facilitate pre-scheduled 1:1 meetings with deep tech investors. The MedTech Innovation 2025 Helsinki Summit’s curated investor-startup matchmaking and dedicated pitching sessions are a perfect example of this in practice, providing a direct pipeline for a pre-vetted portfolio of 24 EIC Scaling Club companies to connect with investors ready to provide capital.
This success story is also a blueprint for a truly pan-European ecosystem. The choice of Riga, Latvia, as the host city for the Ambition Forum is a strategic maneuver that extends the EIC’s mission beyond traditional tech hubs. As Egita Aizsilniece-Ibema, an EIC Scaling Club Advisory Council Member, noted, the collaboration of public and private funding is critical, and hosting Europe’s leading technology developers in Riga is a “major foundational block for Latvia’s innovation ecosystem”. This goes beyond a simple event and becomes a statement about Europe’s unified, collaborative future. By fostering innovation in emerging or less-established hubs, the EIC democratizes access to capital and expertise, creating a more resilient and geographically diverse innovation network that is built on a foundation of continental cohesion.
From Ambition to Impact – The Road Ahead
The €1.2 billion milestone is not merely a number but a strategic marker of Europe’s rise in the global tech landscape. It provides irrefutable validation of the EIC Scaling Club’s model as a powerful engine for translating scientific excellence into tangible economic and societal impact. The EIC is proving that its programmatic approach can successfully bridge the historic funding gap for capital-intensive, science-based ventures.
The MedTech Innovation 2025 Helsinki Summit represents the next critical chapter in this story. The EIC’s broad success in sectors like Next-Gen Computing and Renewable Energies is a powerful proof of concept, and the EIC Scaling Club companies pitching at the summit are poised to be the next wave of success stories. They will replicate the funding triumphs of their peers by applying the same proven model to the vital health and medtech sectors. The summit offers an exclusive platform for investors, corporate leaders, and policymakers to be part of this accelerating journey.
The EIC Scaling Club is not just a program; it is a movement that is actively forging a more competitive, sustainable, and secure future for Europe. The final event of the program in 2026 will serve as the culmination of this two-year effort, a testament to the long-term vision of turning ambition into lasting impact.
