Europe's Growth Stage
Founder Factories
The Seed to Scale Experience Impact — why the most important decision a founder can make is which company they work at, and which stage of their growth they shape, before building their own.
The most important decision
a founder can make
We have spent years watching the early stage ecosystem hype the wrong signals. The Googler with the impressive CV. The unicorn alumn now becoming a founder. The computer science dropout. These are some of the benchmarks the venture capital industry has built its pattern-matching around, but they are not the best indicators of success.
Now that the European startup flywheel is spinning faster and more forcefully, we are seeing more and more founders coming from scaleups to build their own companies. But that flywheel doesn't automatically produce great successes. What really gives founders a competitive edge is more nuanced.
The truth is that where a founder works before they start building their own startup matters to a disproportional extent. And even more importantly than where, is during what phase of building and scaling and for how long they work at these companies.
In fact, working at a startup as it scales from Seed to Series C is the single strongest predictor of future founding success.
Founders who worked at a Seed to Series C company before founding are nearly twice as likely to reach Series A themselves. No other background factor comes even close to the significance of this predictor.
Seed to Series C experience beats having worked at companies like UBER or Spotify. Working at a grown unicorn or a tech company post IPO is as good a predictor as working at any other corporate company.
It beats Big Tech experience. Google and Meta alumni perform no better than founders who worked at a seed-stage startup.
The finding holds across every major European market and is particularly noticeable in Germany and Sweden.
This is good news for European founders. A new generation of founders is emerging from the scaling companies that Europe's first wave of unicorns created, and the data shows they are building better companies, faster, than any generation before them. We have a thriving early-stage ecosystem of capital efficient startups built for speed.
Antler is unusual among venture capital firms in one important respect: we mostly back founders before they have revenue, a market ready product, or a track record. That means we cannot rely on the signals most investors use - traction, revenue, proof of concept. We have had to develop our own understanding of what predicts founding success at the earliest possible stage. What we've learnt anecdotally is that direct experience working in startups as they scale is invaluable for founders.
Over a decade of backing 2,000 companies across 30 markets, we have accumulated one of the world's most detailed datasets on early-stage founder backgrounds and company outcomes. This report is our attempt to apply that dataset and quantify our suspicion. And in the process, answer a question the industry has debated for years but rarely tested: does where you worked before founding actually matter?
Why Seed to Series C experience makes the best founders
- Working at a Seed to Series C company produces a +22.6pp lift in seed-to-Series A conversion, nearly double the European baseline of 23.0%.
- Growth phase matters. Founders who stayed at an employer from Seed through Series B convert at 51.3% — nearly double the baseline. Founders who joined early but left before growth barely outperform those who never worked at a startup at all.
- Big Tech experience (Google, Meta, Amazon and peers) converts at 33.0% — the same rate as seed-stage startup experience, and produces less than half the uplift of growth-stage founder factories (+9.9pp vs +22.6pp).
What we measured and why
This report analyses 51,722 startups across Europe's leading startup markets. Our analysis covers companies that raised a seed round between 2010 and 2021 across the UK, Germany, the Nordics and France — four markets that together represent the core of Europe's early-stage ecosystem. 2021 is the latest cohort included, ensuring every company in the dataset had at least three years in which a Series A could be recorded in the dataset ranging until end of 2025.
We measure founding success as founders who secured a seed-to-Series A conversion, i.e. successfully closed a Series A after their seed. While the success of a company can be measured in many ways, we use this metric because it gives us fast feedback loops and it is statistically unlikely that one will build a true outlier growth company without ever raising a Series A. Raising a Series A gives a founder the right to scale, since they obtain the resources to start building scale at a very critical point.
Among the venture-backed European technology companies in our dataset that have reached IPO, every one had raised a Series A. The exceptions — companies reaching public markets without a recorded Series A — are concentrated in sectors beyond technology, such as bio, mining, real estate, and industrial sectors that follow fundamentally different capital paths. For venture-backed technology companies, the Series A is not one milestone among many: it is the gateway to scale.
Across our 51,722-company analysis, the European baseline conversion rate to reach Series A is 23.0% — less than a quarter of founders go on to reach a Series A funding round after their seed.
To ensure robustness, we also tested this finding against pre-seed-to-Series A conversion in Europe and the baseline conversion is 15.9%. Findings are robust with similar uplifts for founders with Series A/B/C experience — founders with growth-stage backgrounds convert at 43.5% from pre-seed, a +28.3pp lift over the 15.2% baseline for founders with no VC background. However, as 'pre-seed' is a term less commonly used by Crunchbase, the dataset is much smaller, which is why we have concentrated on Seed to Series A conversion.
When we describe a founder as having "Seed to Series C experience", we mean that at least one founder at a given company previously worked at an employer that reached seed, Series A, B or C stage during their tenure — classified by the highest stage that employer had reached by the time they left, regardless of what role they held or which industry the employer was in. It is a measure of exposure to institutional scaling, not a measure of seniority or duration. The question of how long founders stayed, and whether duration matters, is one this report addresses directly in Chapter One.
A note on our conclusions
This is a study of correlation, not causation. We can show that founders who scaled through Series B and beyond convert to Series A at twice the European baseline. We cannot prove the experience caused it — and three limits are worth naming.
The first is selection. Founders who stayed through a company's Series B were, by definition, strong enough to keep at a company successful enough to keep raising. Some of the premium we measure is the experience itself. Some is simply that capable people cluster at winning companies — i.e. a great company attracts more capable people without necessarily drastically boosting their skillsets. It is also fair to assume that people who join companies at this stage are more risk-loving and therefore more likely to move on to (successfully) build their own companies. The practical takeaway holds either way.
The second is what we measure. Seed-to-Series A conversion captures whether a company raised its next institutional round, not whether it became an outlier. We use it because it is observable at scale and because companies that never raise a Series A almost never become outliers, as outlined above. Readers should treat it as a strong proxy for strong growth and conviction during the early stages of a company's scaling, not a verdict on long-term outcomes. We are choosing this metric because measuring the 10 to 15 year impact and success of a company would produce insight that is too slow to obtain meaningful signals for early stage investors.
The third is scope. Our four markets — UK, Germany, France and the Nordics — represent 64% of European seed-stage companies over the 2010–2021 founding year period and therefore the majority of the largest entrepreneurial ecosystems. The finding is consistent across all four. We are confident it reflects a real pattern in Europe's core startup ecosystems.
With these caveats, we can say: across 51,722 companies, no single background factor we tested predicted early founding and scaling success as strongly as having been inside a company while it scaled.
The growth stage
experience founder advantage
SumUp, Back Market, Doctolib, Sorare, Pigment. These are very different companies, operating in very different sectors. But they share something: at least one of their founders worked at a venture-backed company before building their own, and stayed long enough to experience what institutional scaling really looks like.
They had seen the inside of a scaling startup. They knew what VC funding felt like, what obtaining and maintaining product-market fit demanded, and what it meant to build a team, culture and processes under the pressure of growth.
The pan-European lift
Across 51,722 seed-stage companies in Antler's European markets, companies with at least one founder who previously worked at a Seed, Series A, B or C company convert to Series A at nearly double the baseline rate.
The gap between Seed to Series C experience and simple startup experience is as important as the headline number. Working at a startup is not enough. It is specifically working at a startup that has found product-market fit and is scaling through institutional funding rounds that predicts success. The experience of operating in a pre-product-market-fit environment produces less than half the benefit.
The finding holds across all major European markets
The finding is consistent across every major European market, but the strength of the effect varies in ways that reflect each ecosystem's maturity.
| Market | Seed stage lift | Series A/B/C lift |
|---|---|---|
| Pan-European | +9.9pp (32.9%) | +21.5pp (44.5%) |
| United Kingdom | +9.4pp (30.4%) | +13.1pp (34.1%) |
| Germany | +11.7pp (39.9%) | +22.7pp (50.9%) |
| Sweden | +5.6pp (30.1%) | +28.9pp (53.4%) |
It is not just where you worked. It is what you stayed for.
The Seed to Series C finding tells us that exposure to institutional scaling matters. But it does not tell us why. To understand that, we need to look not just at where founders worked, but at when they joined and left.
When we examine the career histories of European founders with date-level precision, a sharper picture emerges. Founders who stayed at their employer long enough to support it raise a Series B or beyond convert at 51.3% — nearly double the European baseline, and higher than the headline Seed to Series C finding itself.
The signal is not about the prestige of the company. It is about being present through the hard work of scaling — the fundraising pressure, the hiring pace, the process-building, the product decisions made under scrutiny. The founders who benefit most are not those who passed through a well-known company briefly. They are the ones who were there when it was hard.
Early entry alone does not explain this. Founders who joined an employer at seed or pre-seed stage but left before significant growth convert at only 33.7% — a modest lift, but far below those who stayed through growth regardless of when they arrived. The timing of arrival matters far less than the experience accumulated before departure.
Scaling experience beats Big Tech experience
Working at Google, Meta, Amazon or their peer companies produces exactly the same seed-to-Series A conversion rate as working at a seed-stage startup: 33.0%, a +9.9pp lift over the 23.0% baseline. Seed to Series C experience produces +22.6pp — more than double.
This is not because Big Tech produces people with poor skillsets. It is because Big Tech operates at a stage of maturity that founders will not encounter for a decade, if ever. The skills that transfer from a company navigating its Series B are not the skills you acquire at a company that completed its own Series B fifteen years ago. Working at Google might look better on a pitch deck. The data suggests that working at a Series B startup is more useful for becoming a successful founder.
What this means for how investors should filter
The implication is uncomfortable for an industry that has built its deal flow filters around legible signals. A founder with a Google stint on their CV looks fundable by almost every heuristic the venture industry uses. A founder who spent four years as employee number fifty at a Series B logistics startup that the mainstream has never heard of looks unremarkable.
The data says the second founder is the better bet.
Growth-stage experience is not glamorous. It does not produce the kind of CV that generates inbound interest or commands a premium valuation at first meeting. But it produces founders who have seen the inside of a scaling organisation, who know what institutional pressure feels like, and who carry the specific operational intuition that predicts success better than any other signal we tested.
The task for Europe's investors is to build filters that find it.
The real
founder factories
The question this report has been building toward is not just whether growth-stage experience predicts founding success. It is where that experience comes from — which specific companies are producing Europe's best new founders.
The answer is not what most people would expect.
Global founder factories producing European founders
Across the founders in our dataset who went on to build successful companies in Europe, we can trace which employers they came from and how many of those companies succeeded. Alumni are defined as founders who worked at a given employer at any point prior to founding, not only their most recent role.
The result is a ranking of the world's most productive founder factories — not by the number of founders they produced, but by the proportion who went on to raise a Series A after their Seed. While the sample sizes for each company are relatively small, the companies at the top of the list are not the ones that dominate the conversation about founder pedigree.
| Employer | Country | Founders | Hit rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| LiveRamp | United States | 10 | 90.0% |
| Improbable | United Kingdom | 8 | 87.5% |
| Withings | France | 10 | 70.0% |
| Zenefits | United States | 22 | 68.2% |
| Indiegogo | United States | 12 | 66.7% |
| Dropbox | United States | 45 | 62.2% |
| Atlassian | Australia | 16 | 56.2% |
| GitHub | United States | 15 | 46.7% |
| Klarna | Sweden | 14 | 42.9% |
| Riot Games | United States | 26 | 42.3% |
Hit rate = proportion of alumni who raised a seed round in Europe (UK, Germany, Nordics, France, 2010–2021) and subsequently raised a Series A. Minimum 8 founders per employer. Series A/B/C employers only, accelerators and venture studios excluded.
The pattern is not about fame. It is about the specific operational experience that comes from navigating institutional scaling — exactly the mechanism this report identifies. The companies at the top of this table are not necessarily the most glamorous. They are the ones that went through the hard work of Series A, B and C growth, and whose alumni carried that experience forward.
The highest-volume factory in our dataset is Zynga, the gaming company, with 103 founders producing a 38.8% hit rate. That is 40 successful European companies with roots in a single US gaming studio. The PayPal effect — the idea that one company's alumni can seed an entire generation of founders — is not unique to Silicon Valley. It is a structural feature of how growth-stage companies work.
What this means
The conventional shorthand for founder pedigree — did they work at a famous company? — is asking the wrong question. The right question is: did they work at a company that was actively scaling when they were there?
A Wimdu alumnus who navigated the chaos of a Rocket Internet scaleup carries more relevant operational experience than someone who spent two years at a post-IPO tech giant maintaining legacy systems. An Improbable engineer who lived through a Series B fundraise and the product decisions that come with it has seen something that a McKinsey consultant, however talented, has not.
The founder factories in this table are producing evidence of that every year. The task for Europe's investors is to start reading the CV differently — not for the logos, but for the scaling experience.
The European
flywheel is spinning
The argument of this report is simple: venture capital has been optimising for imperfect signals. Instead we may need to ask a single, unglamorous question: have you been inside a company as it scaled?
Working at Google might look better on a pitch deck. Working at a Series B startup makes you a better founder.
Why this is good news for Europe
The conventional assumption has long been that Europe lacks the raw material to compete with Silicon Valley at scale. The argument usually runs like this: without the density of Google, Meta, and Amazon alumni that the Bay Area produces, European founders are starting from a disadvantage that no amount of policy or capital can fully close.
This data dismantles that argument. If Big Tech alumni were the primary ingredient of great founders, Europe would always be playing catch-up. But they are not. The primary ingredient is experience of a company scaling through its early and growth stages. Europe has that already.
The question for Europe's venture capital community is whether it will update its filters to reflect this reality. The founders who will define the next decade of European technology are not necessarily the ones with the most impressive academic credentials or the longest list of previous companies. They are the ones who were inside a scaling startup when it mattered most.
They are already here. The task now is to find them, back them, and back them early.