SAFE & the European Defence Fund: Europe’s Eligibility Gate - European Startup Pulse – European Startups, VC & Funding | Lyssna här

Europe solved a capital problem and created an access problem in the same budget cycle. EU-level defence allocations went from 590 million euros before 2021 to 11.3 billion for 2021-2027, plus up to 150 billion in loans. The money is real. What almost nobody has read is the rulebook that comes with it.

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Why this matters for European founders and investors: This is instalment 7 of The European Scale-Up Question. The first four constraints — growth capital, demand, talent, fragmentation — are emergent market failures nobody wrote down. This fifth one, access, is written into EU legislation and summarised instrument by instrument in Annex 2 of the Court's review. It is the first constraint in the series you can look up, and therefore the first you can plan around.

In this episode:

Capital is no longer the only binding constraint — and why that is not the same as capital being solved
The four conditions that convert nominal demand into addressable demand
Why nineteen member states borrowed under SAFE and two of Europe's wealthiest did not
What the eligibility regime means for a pan-European cap table
A framework that travels: subsidised markets increasingly carry entry rules

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