Who funds innovation?

17th of September, 2026

Europe innovates but does not scale: the IPI and SpainCap conference puts Barcelona and Catalonia before the challenge of becoming a "scale up region"

Barcelona, an international benchmark in startup creation, has the opportunity to go a step further and turn itself into a genuine "scale up region" — that is, an area that supports innovative companies as they scale up so they can make the leap to the global market. The aim is to join Europe’s innovation first division alongside cities such as Paris and Berlin. The gap to be closed is captured in a single figure: venture capital investment amounts to around 1% of GDP in the United States; in the European Union, barely 0.2%.

The idea was set out during the conference organised by Iniciativa para la Productividad y la Innovación (IPI), the Cercle d’Economia’s think tank, together with SpainCap, which brought together the main public and private players financing innovation in Catalonia, Spain and Europe. The diagnosis was unanimous: Europe innovates, but it does not scale.

Scalability, Europe’s great unfinished business

Teresa Garcia-Milà, president of the Cercle, opened the conference with a basic question: "Is it capital that is missing, or big projects?" She pointed out that the problem is that European innovation does not scale: we create companies, but very few become global players. Catalonia accounts for around 25% of Spain’s R&D spending, and Barcelona is one of Europe’s leading entrepreneurship hubs. "But scalability remains our unfinished business," she said.

For his part, Enrique Tombas, president of SpainCap, recalled that Spain mobilised €3.3 billion in private capital in the first half of the year, but underlined the critical gap: "We know how to support companies when they are crawling, but not when they are walking." Many Catalan and Spanish startups turn to US investors in order to grow. Tombas called for an incentive architecture that would allow European citizens’ savings to shift out of bank deposits, which yield almost nothing, and into funds that invest in innovation.

Coordinating public capital to gain scale

The first round table, moderated by SpainCap’s director general, José Zudaire, focused on public funding and featured representatives of some of the main public institutions financing innovation at European, Spanish and Catalan level.

María Romano, head of the Grupo BEI office in Spain, said that "Spain has a dynamic innovation ecosystem that is a benchmark in Europe", adding that "Catalonia is a clear example of this ecosystem, and the Grupo BEI is one of the major financers of its development, as reflected in our support for innovation in the region, which spans everything from research and entrepreneurship to global scale-up". Romano noted that "it is at this business scale-up stage that we need to redouble our efforts, so that our highest-potential companies can access the capital they need to grow and compete globally from Europe". To meet this need, the Grupo BEI has just launched the second phase of its European Tech Champions initiative, ETCI 2.0 — a €15 billion fund of funds with which it expects to mobilise up to €80 billion in public and private investment, thereby helping to close the funding gap facing European scale ups.

Vanessa Servera, chief executive of the Institut Català de Finances (ICF), recalled that Catalonia is a scientific powerhouse and a European hub in health, but acknowledged that technology transfer remains fragmented. "Barcelona must be a scale up city. Size matters; atomisation is a brake," she said.

The directors general of COFIDES, AXIS ICO and CDTI agreed that the difficulties lie in the early stages and in the scale-up stages, and that European strategic autonomy depends on closing that gap.

José Moisés Martín, director general of CDTI, summed it up as follows: "We have two valleys of death: technology transfer and scaling up. To grow you have to sell, and the single market is key." He announced that CDTI wants to concentrate on deeptech, where it acts as secretariat, and has launched a €350 million instrument to finance spin offs and laboratory projects requiring only 15% private contribution.

Miguel Tiana, director general of COFIDES, recalled that the state-owned company works along three lines — green transition, digital transition and innovation — and that its mission is to attract foreign investment, drive internationalisation and mobilise social impact funds. He stressed that the greatest difficulties lie in the early stages and in scaling up, where European strategic autonomy and shared value chains carry ever more weight.

Guillermo Jiménez, director general of AXIS-ICO, highlighted that they manage more than €9 billion and operate across all sectors through public-private collaboration, with a call open all year round in 2026. He also noted that public investors have succeeded in attracting a great deal of private capital, and that the challenge now is to adjust the market so that each player specialises in what it does best, strengthening coordination.