The Illusion
(This wasn’t the blog post planned for this week. But after stepping out of a meeting with one of Rumo’s alliance companies, the urge to share feels unavoidable. The reality we’re witnessing - one that’s been quietly destroying companies, people’s wellbeing, economic value, and even political credibility over the past 4–5 years - simply isn’t being talked about enough. And when it is, it often feels like we’re living inside an illusion.)
There’s no shortage of grand visions in Europe right now. Mario Draghi’s long-awaited report on the continent’s economic competitiveness landed months ago, and with it, a renewed sense of urgency. The message is clear: the European Union must mobilize up to €800 billion annually in investment if it hopes to stay relevant on the global stage.
But for those of us working with growth businesses - where innovation is not a concept but a daily act of execution - this narrative feels dangerously off. Because Europe’s problem isn’t just capital. It’s culture. There. It’s said. And hopefully not for the first time.
You can pour billions into venture funds, deep tech, defence technologies, AI, climate regulation and industrial policy. But if the downstream corporate machinery - the buyers, the partners, the decision-makers (i.e., the economy) - remains slow, opaque, and allergic to risk, it’s hard to believe anything will truly change.
Where Innovation Goes to Die
Here’s what really happens when a European growth company tries to sell into a large corporate. They’re welcomed with interest, a flurry of meetings, and vague promises of “strategic alignment.” But quickly, enthusiasm fades into procurement purgatory - endless legal reviews, regional misalignment, contact turnover, and a contracting process that resembles psychological endurance training more than commercial dialogue.
Worse still, we've witnessed companies get pulled into corporate espionage theatre: a potential client feigns interest, extracts technical insight under NDA, then ghosts - or worse, replicates the idea internally. In some cases, it’s barely concealed.
In not-so-rare cases, they go further - joining investor due diligence calls for the very company they’re stringing along, praising its promise and trajectory, helping to attract more capital… only to vanish weeks later without warning. And if they are “lucky” they snatch the leftovers for €1 – so much for European solidarity.
Meanwhile, in the “Kingdom of Far Far Away” - the US or China - this dynamic plays out in reverse. For instance, American corporations - Microsoft, Salesforce, Lockheed Martin, Walmart - don’t just tolerate outside innovation, they actively pursue it. Microsoft’s recent multi-billion-dollar investment and commercial integration with OpenAI is a perfect case in point - a bold partnership with a fast-moving company that reshaped the global AI landscape.
They fund growth companies, integrate their solutions, sign transformational commercial agreements, and often acquire them early - not out of fear, but because it would be far costlier to ignore them.
Because in the US, these companies are viewed as strategic accelerators. In Europe, they’re too often treated as existential threats to the establishment.
Real-World Examples
The automotive sector is a textbook case of European inertia. While Tesla, Rivian, and Chinese EV makers surged ahead, most legacy OEMs in Europe clung to outdated supply chains and rigid internal structures. A decade ago, European growth-stage companies were offering cutting-edge vehicle platforms, intelligent components, and digital systems. Most were ignored or endlessly “piloted.” Now, those same OEMs are playing catch-up in markets they helped lose.
But the pattern goes well beyond cars.
Banking has seen tens of millions of customers migrate to neobanks like Revolut, N26, and Monzo, whose frictionless, mobile-native experiences eclipsed traditional players. By the time legacy institutions took notice, they were already bleeding deposits and relevance.
Insurance, too, is a stark example. Regularly ranked among the worst sectors for customer experience, many insurers today function as little more than underwriters while agile technology companies build modern, user-centric platforms on top.
And yet — instead of forming bold partnerships, most incumbents respond with delay, suspicion, or silence.
Worse still, the insurance industry is often riddled with inefficiencies and fraud mechanisms of its own making. In multiple investment due diligences, we’ve seen how insurance carriers rely on bloated, outsourced operations - entire layers of low-level service providers that act as a bottleneck for quality and performance. Meanwhile, senior management is often unaware of the scale of the issue, and entirely disconnected from the B2B digital solutions trying to fix it.
The result: a protectionist maze, where those trying to improve the system never make it past the non-decision-making layers.
We See It Every Day at Rumo
At Rumo, we work with companies building serious solutions for mobility, energy, and industrial technology. All of our current alliances have B2B activity (in some cases besides its B2C activity) - and all of them, without exception, run into the same wall: corporate structures incapable of onboarding innovation at the speed required.
The pattern is numbing:
A promising conversation with a senior executive
Verbal buy-in: “We’ll sign something next quarter”
A handoff to a regional team, followed by silence or resets
A year later: no signature, no traction
During that time, CEOs and management teams are left managing burn rates, missed forecasts, and redefined roadmaps. Every week without a commercial contract isn’t just a delay - it’s an existential liability.
And here’s the paradox: the very corporates ghosting these companies are often invested in them — either indirectly via pension capital deployed into venture funds, or directly through their own corporate VC arms. In the latter case, there’s often a total disconnect between the VC team and the business units meant to be leveraging those investments.
It’s a broken feedback loop: institutional money feeds growth companies, while institutional behavior crushes them.
Europe vs. the US: The Structural Gap
This isn’t just a cultural problem - it’s architectural.
In the US, landing a contract with a large corporate usually means national reach. In Europe, it often means navigating ten different subsidiaries - each with its own procurement lead, legal structure, risk committee, and internal politics. And European companies, let’s not forget, typically raise less capital, meaning they have less time to break through.
We’ve seen CEOs pitch the same corporate across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Nordics - only to get five different answers. Allow for a little hyperbole, and we can admit the obvious: this isn’t a unified market - it’s a patchwork.
And while Europe is figuring itself out, the US is buying its future. Over 70% of European deep tech and SaaS exits in 2023 went to non-European buyers, mostly from the US. American corporates acquire before they compete. In Europe, we delay until we’re disrupted.
There’s also a perverse narrative still repeated in corporate boardrooms:
“We can’t afford to take that risk - we’re not a start-up.”
But that logic is not only tired - it’s dangerous. The biggest risk is pretending the status quo is safe. Disruption doesn’t wait for committees. Playing it safe is what led entire sectors - automotive, banking, insurance - into obsolescence. That’s not risk management. That’s risk denial.
The Human Cost
And behind all this? People. Executives. Founders. Managers.
Not “visionaries” in the vague sense - but smart, measured, capable people who’ve built products, developed sound go-to-market strategies, made tough hires, raised capital, and sacrificed salaries, security, and years of life.
Too often, they’re not just watching their businesses unravel - they’re watching their lives disintegrate alongside them.
Beyond postponed families, abandoned dreams of home ownership, and non-existent pensions, these people often lose their partners, their peace of mind, their capacity to function in the rest of their lives.
They’re not burning out because they worked long hours. They’re burning out because they’ve been systemically failed.
Ask any CEO or commercial lead in this position what they’d rather have:
another €2–3 million in bridge capital, or a transformational commercial contract with a real client.
Every single one of them will say the latter.
Letting companies fail fast should be a right. Dragging them through three years of vague promises and broken signals is not resilience - it’s cruelty masquerading as process.
A glimmer of hope
There’s still a path forward.
Europe must start seeing growth companies not as distractions or competitors, but as levers for acceleration. These businesses are already staffed. Already funded. Already de-risked by private capital. The only thing missing is access.
Boards and senior executives should be asking:
“How are we using emerging companies to accelerate innovation - at lower cost and faster speed?”
“Where are we missing new markets by failing to partner with players already there?”
“What’s our responsibility to pensioners whose capital is at work in these ventures?”
“Do we treat these engagements as strategic advantage - or risk to avoid?”
Because here’s the truth: these companies are outsourced innovation partners, funded with someone else’s money. This isn’t generosity, it’s just smart.
Why could the board room be the one of the obvious places to start? Because believe it or not, when the board room is proactive and engaged in long term future value, this is where we have seen true change in the corporate culture. It is fascinating to see the difference between most European listed large caps or most generational family-owned businesses, versus a private equity owned business with sense of duty and risk appetite to generate sustainable long-term value – contradicting the classic argument of large caps that sometimes they have too much to lose and can’t take risks that other new players can. They do indeed have a lot to lose if they continue to feed the status quo.
So what now?
How do we change this system - one region, one boardroom, one procurement loop at a time?
How do we ensure that the next generation of industrial champions isn’t strangled before it scales?
How do we get beyond grand plans and big budgets - and actually create space for growth?
Because until we do, Draghi’s €800 billion proposal will certainly become: money in the wrong hands, while the future gets built somewhere else.