Onefive Editorial · Paris · Last verified 29 August 2026
How this page is built
Every row names its publisher and links to the primary page. We do not restate a figure we could not open.
Atomico's State of European Tech 2025 is the source for continent-wide capital, unicorn counts, the UK total, and Europe versus US median round sizes. PitchBook's Q1 2025 European venture report is the source for the euro seed median. Dealroom is the source for the seed-to-Series A conversion. DocSend's 2024 fundraising research is the source for time-to-close and deck dwell time.
Atomico's 2025 capital figures are year-to-date extrapolations (notes on the source page: data as of 30 September 2025 for capital, 31 October 2025 for new unicorns). Treat them as the current public benchmark, not a locked year-end close.
Market snapshot
The size of the pool, and how concentrated it is. A European raise happens inside these totals, not inside a US blog post.
| Metric | Figure | Note | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private European tech investment, 2025 | about $44B | On track, +7% versus 2024, still well below the 2021-2022 peak. | Atomico |
| Funded European tech companies | more than 40,000 | Up from 13,000 a decade earlier. | Atomico |
| European $1B+ tech companies | 413 | Up from 127 at the end of 2016. New 2025 unicorns came from 11 countries. | Atomico |
| European VC funding as a share of GDP | 0.17% | Atomico's 2030 target in the same report is 1% of GDP. | Atomico |
| UK capital invested, 2025 | $14B | +22% year on year. The UK stayed first. Atomico does not publish a matching 2025 total for every other country as a single headline figure on that page. | Atomico |
| Concentration of capital | high outside the UK | In France and Sweden the top five deals account for more than 50% of funding. In Finland the equivalent is about 80%. In the UK it is about 25%. | Atomico |
Cheques by stage
Medians, not averages. A handful of AI rounds pull every mean up. Use the median when you set a target.
| Metric | Figure | Note | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median European seed deal, Q1 2025 | €2.2M | Median valuation €5.6M. This is a PitchBook euro figure for Q1, not a full-year Atomico dollar median. | PitchBook |
| European seed and Series A median growth, 2025 | +23% and +25% | Year on year, all European rounds. Atomico does not print the 2025 seed median in dollars as a single headline on that chapter. | Atomico |
| Median European Series B / Series C, 2025 | $30M / $50M | Back near the 2021 and 2022 peak years, per Atomico. | Atomico |
| European seed versus US seed, 2025 | 50% of the US median | The gap narrows to 79% of the US median by Series B. | Atomico |
| European seed companies that later raise a Series A | about 24% | Dealroom's European funnel. Raising a seed already puts a company in a minority. | Dealroom |
Time and attention
How long a successful early raise takes, and how long an investor actually spends on the deck.
| Metric | Figure | Note | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Successful seed and pre-seed time-to-close | 12 weeks or less | DocSend, 2024 research, successful raises. Most European processes still run four to six months from first meeting to close if they stall. | DocSend |
| Average investor visit to a seed deck | 3 minutes 44 seconds | DocSend, 2024. The visit is short; the dataroom is where diligence actually happens. | DocSend |
What this page does not claim
- There is no Onefive founder survey behind these rows. Onefive is in pre-launch. We do not have N respondents, and we will not invent them for a backlink.
- We do not publish a seed-size-by-country table. Atomico's public chapter gives a UK total and concentration notes, not a median seed for each member state. Secondary blogs that invent a full country grid are not sources.
- We do not publish an investor-to-founder ratio by sector. That figure is not in the Atomico, PitchBook, Dealroom, or DocSend pages linked here.
Sources
How to cite this page
Onefive, European startup fundraising benchmarks 2025, compiled from Atomico, PitchBook, Dealroom and DocSend. Please link the figure to the publisher named in the row, not only to this page.
The stages behind the numbers
Cheque sizes sit inside a sequence. The funding-stages guide walks through pre-seed to IPO with the same sources.
Funding stages, pre-seed to IPO · Funding a startup in France · European startup funding tracker
