“We are not too late to change Europe’s trajectory, if we take the right steps today.” That is the promise of the newly launched Rhine Group – a forum pushing for a stronger response to the continent’s widening innovation and competitiveness gap – but its launch has nevertheless attracted early criticism.
Launched on 24 August 2026, the Rhine Group brings together 55 business leaders, entrepreneurs, economists, academics and former policymakers, with former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi (author of the famed Draghi Report) and Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison serving as co-chairs.
For European startups, the initiative lands at the centre of a familiar problem: Europe continues to produce technical talent, research and ambitious companies, but struggles to turn those strengths into globally dominant technology businesses at the same rate as the United States.
Sean Blanchfield, former member of the Irish Government’s AI Advisory Council and CEO of Jentic, shared:”The Rhine Group’s urgency is justified. Two years ago, the Draghi competitiveness report called for €750 billion in new annual investment in energy, technology, and defence, dwarfing the post-WWII Marshall Plan in real terms. This reflects the actual scale of the intervention required to secure our future stability and prosperity.”
According to the Rhine Group, only four of the world’s 50 largest technology companies are European, while the continent remains weak across many of the emerging technologies expected to shape the coming decades.
Its membership includes several figures closely connected to Europe’s technology and venture ecosystem, including Atomico CEO and Founding Partner Niklas Zennström, Celonis co-founder and co-CEO Bastian Nominacher, The Exploration Company founder and CEO Hélène Huby, Bending Spoons co-founder and CEO Luca Ferrari, Klarna Co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Iliad Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer Xavier Niel. Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, President and Managing Director at General Catalyst, is also among the members.
The Rhine Group was established to help translate the recommendations contained in Draghi’s 2024 report, The Future of European Competitiveness (aka the Draghi Report), into reforms.
The first session is scheduled to take place from 20–23 September 2026.
Draghi’s original report placed innovation, investment and productivity at the heart of Europe’s economic challenge. Its recommendations covered areas including digital infrastructure, energy, capital markets, defence, industrial policy and education, reflecting an argument increasingly heard across the European startup ecosystem: creating innovative companies is only part of the challenge.
Europe also needs the capital, customers, infrastructure and regulatory environment that allow those companies to scale without having to look elsewhere.
“Europe has always had the innovation and talent. What we need is the belief to back ourselves, and the willingness to invest to fund that belief. We need our emerging companies to find great public and private customers at home, and to have a real choice to stay European as they succeed,” adds Sean.
The Rhine Group says continued economic stagnation could eventually weaken Europe’s capacity to fund defence, public healthcare, pensions, education, climate investment and social safety nets.
They also believe the environment has become more difficult since Draghi published his report, pointing to stronger Chinese competition, increasing strategic dependencies and a more protectionist United States.
Rather than producing another broad diagnosis of Europe’s weaknesses, its stated ambition is to help identify reforms that can move from policy proposals towards implementation.
Its launch has nevertheless attracted early criticism, particularly over the limited representation of Central and Eastern Europe. French and German members form the largest national groups, while former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is the only representative from countries that joined the European Union in 2004 or later.
Poland, despite its significant economic growth and expanding technology ecosystem, has no representative.
There is also an awkward reflection of Europe’s wider technology dependence in the group’s own infrastructure. Although focused on strengthening European strategic autonomy, the Rhine Group is headquartered in Switzerland, while its website uses technology and infrastructure from US companies including Webflow and Amazon Web Services.
In some respects, that contradiction illustrates the scale of the problem the group has been created to address: European organisations, startups and institutions still frequently rely on technology platforms built elsewhere.
For European founders, that makes the Rhine Group worth watching. Draghi’s 2024 report provided an extensive diagnosis of why Europe is losing ground. The more difficult task now is turning competitiveness from a policy discussion into conditions that startups can actually feel.
Source: EU-Startups
