Europe Doesn't Have a Funding Problem.

What a side project built with ClaudeCode taught me about 671 grant calls, a quarter-trillion euros in funding, and the "go to the US" advice I used to repeat without checking.

A few months ago I was doing something pretty unglamorous for three clients in a row : manually trawling BPI France, ANR, a couple of regional portals and the EU’s funding site, trying to catch every call for proposals that might fit their profile before someone else’s grant writer did.

Same job, three times, three separate spreadsheets.

Somewhere in the third round I opened a terminal, pointed ClaudeCode at the problem, and asked it to help me scrape and score these calls instead of doing it by hand again. I should say clearly that I’m not a developer. I run a consulting practice, not an engineering team. But that’s kind of the point of where these tools are in 2026 : what would have needed a small dev team eighteen months ago took me a handful of focused sessions of describing the problem and testing what came out.

The tool worked well enough that I kept using it. Then a couple of partners saw it over my shoulder during a meeting in Brussels and asked for access. Then a partner working on European consortium bids asked the same thing. So I did what you do when three separate people ask for the same slightly ridiculous internal tool : I turned it into an actual product.

It’s called F3I, and it now watches 27 funding portals across 16 countries and scores every call it finds against each client’s specific profile.

That’s not really what I want to write about today though.

What actually surprised me, running this thing for a few months, is what it revealed about a narrative I’d more or less accepted without checking : that if you want serious funding for a startup, especially anything deeptech, you go to the US, because that’s where the money is.

That’s wrong (partially)

Comparatively Europe seems empty. It isn’t. It’s badly organized, spread across dozens of agencies that don’t talk to each other, written in bureaucratic language, and effectively invisible unless you know exactly where to look.

As I’m writing this, one new client’s dashboard shows 671 calls analysed.

671 individual calls the tool actually opened, read (including attachments, when there are any), and scored, spanning everything from deeptech and semiconductors to agriculture, culture and regional economic development, in initiatives ranging from a 20K€ sub-grant to a multi-hundred-million-euro EU cluster programme.

I want to be honest about the limits here too, because it matters for the argument I’m about to make. F3I doesn’t cover every country yet, and even where it does, it doesn’t catch every regional agency or sector fund. Coverage keeps growing, but if you ran this today across all 27 member states plus the UK, Switzerland and Norway with zero gaps, the real number wouldn’t be 671. It would be several times that.

So let’s try to put an actual figure on what that represents in public money for 2026 and 2027. I’ll say upfront this isn’t rigorous economics, it’s a back-of-envelope estimate built on a couple of public reference points, but I think the order of magnitude holds.

The European Commission just adopted its Horizon Europe work programme for 2026-2027: €14 billion for those two years, and that’s a single EU-level programme among dozens F3I tracks. Zoom out and Eurostat’s latest figures put EU governments’ own R&D budgets, national money, not the EU-level programmes, at close to €128 billion for 2024 alone, growing a bit over 3% a year. Just adding those two buckets together gets you into the neighborhood of a quarter of a trillion euros of public research and innovation money moving through the system over 2026 and 2027 combined, before counting regional schemes or sector-specific ones (France2030 alone, even after this year’s budget cuts, is still committing over €4 billion in 2026).

Now put that next to private investment over the same window. European VC investors put about €62 billion into startups in 2024. Run that forward two years and you’re around €125 billion for 2026-2027, roughly half of that rough public-money estimate above.

The pool of public funding sitting behind government portals in Europe is comparable in size to, arguably larger than, the entire European venture capital industry over the same period.

It’s just spread across hundreds of individual calls instead of a few hundred term sheets, which is exactly why it’s so easy to miss.

The US comparison now .

American VCs are investing something like four times what European ones are, by most recent estimates. That deserves its own article, and I’m not going to argue it away. But it’s a private capital gap. It has almost nothing to do with whether public money exists on this side of the Atlantic to get a European deeptech company through its first few years. It clearly does, at a scale that surprised me even after building a tool whose entire job is to go find it.

I didn’t start this to build a funding-intelligence company. I started it because I was tired of doing the same manual search three times over for three clients.

But watching that counter climb past 600, then 700 calls, week after week, sector after sector, country after country, has genuinely changed how I think about the “just go to the US” advice I used to repeat.

The money is here. Most of it is just sitting behind a login page and an obscur forms to fulfill.

Which brings me to the number actually worth sitting with. Stack Horizon Europe, national R&D budgets and European VC together, and Europe is moving something like €375 billion over 2026 and 2027. American VCs alone, without touching a cent of US federal research money, are on track to deploy something closer to €500 billion over the same two years. That’s a real gap. It is not the humiliating, no-contest gap the “just go to the US” line implies. Count both hands instead of one, public and private together, and Europe isn’t ten times behind. It’s maybe a third behind.

So the honest lesson isn’t that Europe lacks money. It’s that Europe makes you work paintfully for it.

Twenty-seven countries, a few hundred agencies, no shared login, half the good calls announced on a page nobody outside one ministry ever bookmarks.

European fragmentation didn’t start with funding portals. This is a continent that needed two thousand years and a couple of world wars just to agree on a shared currency, and a third of it still opted out. Scattered institutions that don’t talk to each other isn’t a bug here. It’s closer to be our Operating System.