By Alberto Onetti
$4 trillion and 100,000 new companies.
These are the outcomes of a quarter-century of venture capital investments into startups.
Since the new millennium, $4.2 trillion has been invested into the global startup economy, producing 97,982 scaleups.
Of these, 7,030 have raised more than $100 million. We call them the Scalers. And 473 have surpassed the $1 billion mark in capital raised. We call them the Super Scalers.
These are just some of the findings of the latest report, “The Calm Before the AI Storm: Global Innovation Ecosystems: Who Leads, Who Lags, and Who Could Rise – Startup Ecosystem Stars 2025 Report,” produced by Mind the Bridge with Crunchbase for the Startup Ecosystem Stars Awards held in Paris last month.
The innovation paradox: Nothing seems to move
While comparing the world’s Startup Atlas 2025 with the 2024 edition, one thing becomes clear: despite the “new economy” continuing to generate industry disruptors at a steady pace — with nearly 8,000 new scaleups added since January — the overall picture of global innovation remains largely unchanged.
And for much of the world, that’s not good news. The balance of power has barely moved.
- North America continues to dominate, with 43% of the world’s scaleups, while attracting an even larger share of capital — now exactly half of all global scaleup investments.
- The APAC region maintains its second-place position, with about 27,000 scaleups (27% of the global volume) that have raised $1.3 trillion (31% of total capital).
- Europe remains stuck in third place, failing to gain relevance. The Old Continent is actually getting “old,” accounting for 22% of scaleups but just 13% of global investments. In other words, Europe doesn’t have enough companies, and even worse, they’re under-capitalized.
- The Middle East, Latin America and Africa still struggle to meaningfully appear on the global map.
In a world where concentration attracts more concentration, reshaping the landscape takes time. But the iceberg rule applies: most activity happens below the surface — and reveals itself only much later. And today, there is far more dynamism beneath the surface than the top-line numbers suggest.
A decade in the world of innovation
But just zoom out, and everything changes.
A decade on planet Startup is a geological era.
The Innovation Ecosystem Life Cycle Curve hasn’t changed shape, but it has become dramatically more crowded, with far more weight shifted toward the later stages.
In 2015, fewer than 500 startup ecosystems sat on the global curve. The Star stage was an exclusive club of just three tech hubs (Silicon Valley, New York and Beijing), and only 13 ecosystems had reached the Scaleup stage. In short, the startup scene was relatively simple and still heavily concentrated in the U.S. and APAC.
Ten years later, the landscape is radically different. Nearly 900 ecosystems now appear on the curve. The Star stage includes 19 ecosystems (a 6x increase), while the Scaleup stage counts 45 (3.5x growth).
If we look into the crystal ball, it’s easy to foresee that by 2030 the life cycle curve may host 1,500-plus ecosystems, a massive expansion.
Of these, 40-50 are likely to reach the Star stage, and 90-100 the Scaleup stage. Practically speaking, this means one thing for innovation hunters (VCs and corporates): Navigating this landscape is about to become a serious headache.
The geography of the startup economy has also shifted.
On the right-hand side — the upper stages — the dominance pattern remains similar: once led by the U.S. (2) and China (1), the Star stage is now shared by the U.S. and APAC (8 each), with Israel, London and Paris as notable exceptions.
But moving left along the curve, Europe is gaining ground.
At the Scaleup stage, Europe now counts 12 ecosystems (up from just two a decade ago), surpassing APAC.
And in the startup and standup stages, Europe is now the region with the highest number of ecosystems overall.
In a nutshell: Europe seems to have built a broad, diversified base — but the question remains: Is this latent potential waiting to emerge, or simply the result of structural fragmentation?
A final note: Latin America, the Middle East and Africa are — with a few exceptions — almost absent from the Star (Israel) and Scaleup (Dubai, São Paulo and Istanbul) stages. In the Startup stage, they represent only 10 out of 93 ecosystems. In the Standup stage, we finally see larger volumes (73 out of 721).
The question is: When will this immense innovation potential finally surface?
— For more insights, you can download the report: “The Calm Before the AI Storm: Global Innovation Ecosystems: Who Leads, Who Lags, and Who Could Rise” here.
Alberto Onetti is chairman of Mind the Bridge and a professor at University of Insubria. He is a serial entrepreneur who has started three startups in his career, the last of which is Funambol, among the five Italian scaleups that have raised the largest amount of capital. He is recognized among the leading international experts in open innovation and has wide experience in setting up and managing open innovation projects — venture clients, venture builders, intrapreneurship, CVCs — with large multinational companies, as well as advising and training on this subject. Onetti has a column on Sifted (Financial Times) and several other tech blogs.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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