EIT Digital among Europe's top accelerators

In the latest Start-up Heatmap Report, the EIT Digital Accelerator has been ranked 4th place among all accelerator programmes in Europe.

Start-up Heatmap Europe is the benchmark report on the attractiveness of start-up hubs in Europe. The annual issue is the most comprehensive study on the development of start-up ecosystems and founder mobility in Europe to date. The analysis spans 100+ start-up cities in Europe, dozens of data points on ecosystem dynamics as well as a survey of more than 1 500 founders.

Established in 2016, the report includes for the first time Accelerator programmes in the survey, asking founders and the tech community which of these they would recommend to an aspiring entrepreneur. In the overall European comparison, the EIT Digital Accelerator achieved 4th place with almost 9% of all votes.

We are very proud to be recognised as one of the Top Accelerator brands in Europe. Our team works hard to support European deep technology scale-ups to grow internationally, whether to give them access to new target customers or to open doors to investors. Our goal is to create European success stories.

Dolf Wittkämper, Head of EIT Digital Accelerator

Europe’s ecosystem is still fragmented, but we see increased mobility among founders, moving to foreign places or building transnational ties. Accelerators play an important role in this, as they open up doors to their communities for outsiders and offer a streamlined path to internationalization.

Thomas Kösters, founder and CEO of Start-up Heatmap

The main findings of The Start-up Heatmap Report are:

• Increased mobility with 30% more foreign-born founders since 2016
• Fast internationalization as 55% of European start-ups establish international locations within their first year
• Top Hubs are losing momentum as London and Berlin hit a four-year low in popularity
• Founders increasingly rely on transnational networks, with the most eminent spanning between London, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, and Lisbon
• Brexit divides European founders: Northern and Western countries lose faith, while CEE seems to gather around London

Explore more about the Start-up Heatmap and its report here

Find the full Accelerator ranking here