Venture capital investment into Europe’s tech industry plunged by half in 2023 as investors continued to reel from the effects of high interest rates, according to data from venture capital firm Atomico.
However, artificial intelligence was a standout category that saw continued mega funding rounds.
Atomico’s “State of European Tech” report, published Tuesday, showed that overall funding for European venture-backed companies is projected to decline 45% in 2023 from a year ago.
Total venture funding for European tech companies will reach $45 billion this year, Atomico expects. That’s down from $82 billion in 2022, which is itself down from $100 billion the previous year.
Atomico said that this year was a case of correction and a reversal to the pre-pandemic years which saw a wild rise in valuations and funding levels as the tech industry secured record amounts of capital flows.
Tom Wehmeier, head of data insights at Atomico, told CNBC that where Europe stood out was that the region is actually up on the past three years compared to its U.S., Chinese, and other international counterparts.
“There has been this reset after an overheated and unsustainable period of growth in 2021 and early 2022,” Wehmeier told CNBC. “Now you see that new reality is embedded and green shoots are starting to emerge.”
U.S. and Asian institutional investment into European tech faded in a big way, Wehmeier said, as “tourist” funds like Tiger Global and Coatue, who flooded the market in 2020 and 2021, retreated in the last year or so as macroeconomic headwinds caused them to get cold feet.
Whereas the U.S. has declined 8% and China slipped 9% for overall venture funding since 2020, Europe has seen investment levels grow 19% in the same time period, in a sign of resilience for the region.
Green shoots
Still, tech has benefited from a rush of interest in artificial intelligence.
Companies like Aleph Alpha, Mistral, and DeepL have raised hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of capital from investors at high valuations thanks to the hype swirling around OpenAI, which is behind the wildly popular ChatGPT chatbot.
According to Atomico, AI was the biggest pull for fundraising rounds amounting to $100 million or more, with 11 AI companies bagging these so-called “megarounds.”
At seed stage, AI was the buzziest space for investors, attracting 11% of all funding rounds worth $5 million or less, Atomico said.
Meanwhile, Europe is the top hub for global AI talent, with the number of highly-skilled AI roles rising 10-fold over the past decade and outstripping the U.S.
Climate tech was another standout sector, according to Atomico. Funding into companies in the carbon and energy space accounted for 27% of all capital invested in European tech in 2023, three times more than in 2021.
According to Atomico, the combined value of all private and publicly listed tech companies in Europe topped $3 trillion in 2023, regaining that level after slumping well below it in 2022.
Last year, the European tech sector saw $400 billion wiped off its overall market capitalization.
IPO window remains closed
There have been virtually no IPOs of significant scale in Europe this year.
Arm, the British chip designer, went public in the U.S., and its performance has been lackluster since. Company shares are up from its debut price, but the performance of Arm, and other recently listed tech firms like Instacart and Klaviyo, haven’t convinced other tech leaders to pursue stock listings.
Still, Wehmeier said there’s now a healthy pipeline of companies looking to tap the public markets. Late-stage companies like Klarna, Revolut and Monzo are looking closer to the IPO gates than they’ve ever been.
Meanwhile, mergers and acquisitions activity remained muted compared to earlier years. Deal transaction value reached $36 billion in 2023, with the majority of exits being smaller, sub-$100 million value deals, Atomico said.
Elon Musk on Monday threatened Apple with legal action over alleged antitrust violations related to rankings of the Grok AI chatbot app, which is owned by his artificial intelligence startup xAI.
“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action,” Musk wrote in a post on social media platform X.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
“Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your “Must Have” section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics?” Musk said in another post.
Apple last year tied up with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop and desktop products. Musk at that time had said that “If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation.”
CNBC confirmed that ChatGPT was ranked No. 1 in the top free apps section of the American iOS store, and was the only AI chatbot in Apple’s “Must-Have Apps” section.
Prior to his legal threats against Apple, Musk had celebrated Grok surpassing Google as the fifth top free app on the App Store.
OpenAI on Thursday announced GPT-5, its latest and most advanced large-scale AI model, following xAI Grok 4 chatbot released last month.
This is not the first time Apple has been challenged on antitrust grounds. The Department of Justice last year sued Apple over iPhone ecosystem monopoly.
In June, a panel of judges denied Apple’s emergency application to halt the changes to its App Store. The iPhone maker had requested the appeals court to pause an order that said the company could no longer charge a commission on payment links inside its apps nor tell developers how the links should look.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan makes a speech on stage in Taipei, Taiwan May 19, 2025.
Ann Wang | Reuters
President Donald Trump said Monday that he and members of his cabinet met with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, days after he called on the head of the chipmaker to resign. Intel shares rose 2% in extended trading.
“I met with Mr. Lip-Bu Tan, of Intel, along with Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story. Mr. Tan and my Cabinet members are going to spend time together, and bring suggestions to me during the next week. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
An Intel spokesperson confirmed the meeting.
“Earlier today, Mr. Tan had the honor of meeting with President Trump for a candid and constructive discussion on Intel’s commitment to strengthening U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Tan has been an Intel director since 2022, and in March he replaced Pat Gelsinger as CEO. Last week Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., questioned Tan’s ties to China. Cotton brought up a past criminal case involving Cadence Design, where Tan had been CEO, and asked whether Intel required Tan to divest from positions in chipmakers linked to the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army and any other concerning entities in China.
Trump’s latest message marks a stark change in tone from last week. In a Truth Social post on Thursday, the president wrote that Tan “is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem.”
Intel said in a comment later that day that the company, directors and Tan are “deeply committed to advancing U.S. national and economic security interests.”
The Trump administration has taken a heavy hand in the business world, particularly in the semiconductor market, as the U.S. battles with China for supremacy in artificial intelligence. Over the weekend, Nvidia agreed to pay the federal government a 15% cut in return for receiving export control licenses that will allow it to once again sell its H20 chip to China and Chinese companies. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited Trump in the White House on Friday.
President Trump on Monday said that he initially asked Nvidia for a 20% cut of the chipmaker’s sales to China, but the number came down to 15% after Huang negotiated with him.
“I said, ‘listen, I want 20% if I’m going to approve this for you, for the country,'” Trump said at a news conference in Washington, D.C.
Tan, 65, took over Intel after the struggling chipmaker had failed to gain significant traction in the AI market, which Nvidia dominates, while it was burning cash to build its foundry business for chip manufacturing.
Tan was born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore before moving to the U.S. and receiving a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said in late July that his first few months as Intel’s CEO had not been easy, with layoffs and cuts to the foundry division.
Intel canceled plans for manufacturing sites in Germany and Poland and would slow down development in Ohio, he told employees.
“Turning the company around will take time and require patience,” Tan said on a conference call with analysts in July. “We have a lot to fix in order to move the company forward.”
Intel shares are up 3% this year as of Monday’s close. The S&P 500 is up 8.4%.
StubHub, the ticketing marketplace that spun out of eBay in 2020, has resumed its plans to go public and is now aiming to hold its IPO next month, CNBC has learned.
The company originally paused its IPO plans in April as the stock market was reeling from President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs. The decision came after StubHub submitted its prospectus in March indicating it would list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “STUB.”
StubHub now expects to kick off its IPO roadshow after Labor Day, Sept. 1, and make its debut later in the month, according to a source familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the discussions are confidential.
The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
StubHub also filed an updated IPO prospectus on Monday. It reported revenue growth in the first quarter of 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. Operating income came in at $26.8 million for the period, after the company lost $883,000 in the year-ago period, but its net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.
The IPO market has come to life in recent months after an extended dry spell due to high inflation and rising interest rates. A flurry of startups have made their public debuts, including rocket maker Firefly Aerospace, design software company Figma, crypto firm Circle and AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave. Bullish, the cryptocurrency exchange that counts Peter Thiel as an investor, also filed its IPO prospectus last month.
StubHub has been a longtime player in the ticketing industry since its launch in 2000. It was purchased by eBay for $310 million in 2007, but was reacquired by its co-founder Eric Baker in 2020 for $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.
The company had sought a $16.5 billion valuation before it began the IPO process, CNBC previously reported. StubHub didn’t provide an expected pricing range for its shares in the filing.
As it prepares to go public, StubHub is contending with hefty competition in the online ticketing market. In addition to Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation, StubHub is up against secondary market companies, including Vivid Seats, SeatGeek and TicketNetwork
For the first quarter, StubHub reported gross merchandise sales of $2.08 billion, up 15% from a year prior. That was a slowdown from 47% expansion the previous quarter. StubHub said GMS, or the total value paid by buyers for tickets and fulfillment, builds in each quarter and that initial sales for major concert tours typically occur near the end of the year.