SEP ELITE Tech Scaleup 100 – The ranking unveiled!

The first 100 European tech scaleups have been unveiled today, during the second SEP Scaleup Summit taking place at London Stock Exchange Group in London. Mind the Bridge in collaboration with ELITE, London Stock Exchange Group’s business support and capital raising programme, as part of Startup Europe Partnership (SEP), launched the “SEP ELITE Tech Scaleup 100” a ranking of the top 100 tech European scaleups.

Inclusion in the ranking is based on an algorithm that factors capital raised by the company since inception and qualitative parameters (such as employee growth, competitive position, IP and trademarks, traffic growth, sentiment analysis and M&A activity), analyzed in partnership with AI startup Zirra (*). The weight of the qualitative component will be increased over time, as more parameters are added and data is collected, increasing the accuracy and training of the AI models.

Announced three months ago, on the occasion of the first SEP Scaleup Summit hosted by Borsa Italiana in Milan, today is the unveiling of the first SEP ELITE Tech Scaleups 100 names.

Download the SEP ELITE Tech Scaleup 100 infographic

Top 3 EU tech scaleups are Spotify, Delivery Hero, and IHS Markit.

Out of the top 100, 32 are from the UK, 17 from Germany and 11 from France. 18 countries represented in total. Fintech is the dominant industry (19 scaleups out of the top 100), followed by E-Commerce (10) and FashionTech and Enterprise Software (8 scaleups each).

“In Europe, but above all outside of Europe, we don’t have a clear perception of what’s happening at the forefront of innovation on the Continent. Actually, the truth is that in Europe we are able to produce fast-growing startups”, Alberto Onetti, SEP Coordinator and Mind the Bridge Chairman commented. “Through this new Index we aim to provide international visibility to the best European tech companies by tapping into the analytical methodology we have developed in these last few years with Startup Europe Partnership.”

Luca Peyrano, CEO of ELITE, added “Scaleups are companies with great ambitions and high growth potential. They are the future of tomorrow’s economic prosperity. We are pleased to support the first edition of the Scaleup Summit together with Mind The Bridge, EBAN, the European Startup Network, The ScaleUp Institute and the support of the European Commission. Together we are committed to creating a dynamic European ecosystem that is conducive to growth, innovation, and where entrepreneurs can access the appropriate support and tools they need to thrive. ELITE’s mission is to support dynamic fast-growing companies because of their unique ability to innovative, create jobs and because they represent an extraordinary driving force for economic development in Europe.”

The ranking is to be issued on a quarterly basis with the goal of regularly providing a snapshot of Europe’s high-tech industry and to showcase the most innovative European startups that are scaling up. The ranking is not an indicator of investment or business quality, rather a way to highlight some of the most active tech scaleups in Europe, raising awareness on one of the most important segments for Europe’s future prosperity.

“Today the ranking of the top 100 European tech scaleups has been unveiled. We plan to issue the SEP ELITE Tech Scaleup 250, SEP ELITE Tech Scaleup 500, SEP ELITE Tech Scaleup 1000 in the coming months.” – continued Alberto Onetti – And the algorithm will be adjusted to better factor in the quality of the companies and to go beyond quantitative proxies.”

“Our technology ingests and makes sense of news articles, websites, social media posts, legal and regulatory filings – all types of publicly accessible data on the web – said Aner Ravon, co-founder and CRO of Zirra – Using a suite of domain-customized Natural Language Processing techniques together with a variety of Machine Learning algorithms, we identify companies, people, acquisitions, product launches and many other events. We sift through the millions of inputs to assemble an accurate company fingerprint. Beyond just the facts, Zirra identifies insights, signals, relationships and trends. The SEP ELITE Tech Scaleup index presented here is created using scoring built from some of the signals that Zirra continuously tracks on all companies in our database. Future plans include utilizing Recurrent Neural Networks for processing, analysis and scoring. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute with our technology to support the European scaleup ecosystem”.

Companies interested in getting a more comprehensive valuation can provide further information by completing the digital self-assessment tool ELITE Growth Compass, whose score will be included in the algorithm. A link to the tool can be found here: https://etinerary.elite-growth.com/en

(*) The qualitative analysis – produced in partnership with Zirra – currently factors in the following eight parameters: employee growth rate over the past 12 months, years active, funding trajectory, competitive position, IP and trademarks, traffic growth (current month vs. past six months), M&A activity, and Google sentiment analysis. The algorithm will be adjusted to factor in revenue and revenue growth plus other indicators. For private companies, revenue will be considered only if disclosed by companies.