2023-12-03 20:13:52
On this last day of November, it is as cold in Helsinki as it is on the tech planet. As snow falls on the city where the Slush trade fair dedicated to European start-ups is being held, the British venture capital fund Atomico presents its annual report. With only 45 billion dollars raised in 2023 (41.3 billion euros), European technology companies are suffering after two years of euphoria: 100 billion for the year 2021 and 82 billion for the year 2022.
Cooled, the 13,000 visitors to this event are not. Perhaps because the performances displayed by the Old Continent remain the third best historically, and are 18% higher than those of 2020 when the United States and China respectively recorded a decline of 1% and 7% on the same period.
The atmosphere of the event does not lend itself to discouragement either. Plunged into darkness streaked with neon and light beams, the Helsinki Exhibition Center had, for two days, more of a nightclub than a trade show. Even if, in terms of attendance, the show does not compete with Vivatech in Paris (150,000 visitors during its last edition) or the Web Summit in Lisbon (70,000).
An appreciated bias
He doesn’t pretend to. After the cancellation of the 2020 edition due to the Covid-19 epidemic, the organizers took the decision to reduce the number of participants, which had peaked at 25,000 in 2019. “Previously, we tried to increase the audience of the event, but we decided to focus on what was most important for the founders of young start-ups: the quality of the discussions,” explains Slush Managing Director Eerika Savolainen.
A bias appreciated by the participants of the show, which takes up the codes of events of this type: conferences delivered by prestigious speakers, pitches from entrepreneurs, national delegations coming to present their young shoots… But the essence of the space is dedicated to meetings between entrepreneurs and investors, each recognizable by the color of their badge.
There’s something for everyone. Sylvain Bataillard, co-founder of the HyPrSpace start-up which is developing a space microlauncher, highlights “the quality of the investors present”. Hamid Echarkaoui, who runs Cryptr (cybersecurity), and has just returned from the Web Summit, appreciates this “cozier, very international event”. Among his interlocutors that day were Indians and Koreans.
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