Germany’s Startup Ecosystem 2022–2025: What We Built

From January 2022 to May 2025, I had the rare opportunity to shape Germany’s innovation ecosystem from the inside as Federal Startup Commissioner. This piece draws a balance sheet — what we built, what worked, and where work remains.

The Starting Problem: Why Germany Had a Startup Challenge

When I took office in January 2022, the diagnosis was clear: Germany had a structural capital market problem. Startups could find seed funding, but capital dried up at the transition to growth stage. Series B and Series C rounds were nearly impossible to close without relying on US or Asian investors. The consequence: decisions about European technology companies were increasingly being made outside Europe.

The second structural problem was institutional: Germany had no coordinated innovation and startup policy. There were many well-meaning individual measures — funding lines, technology programmes, incubators — but no coherent overall picture. A shortcoming I wanted to address directly: „A pattern I observed was drafting many strategies that stalled significantly in implementation.“

The Startup Strategy 2022: A Systematic Approach

In June 2022, the federal cabinet passed Germany’s first comprehensive Startup Strategy. 130 measures, 10 action fields, coordinated across ministries. This made Germany the first country in the EU with such a structured overall strategy for its startup ecosystem.

The ten action fields addressed the entire value chain: financing, talent, founding infrastructure, public procurement, regulation, sustainability, international scaling, diversity, knowledge transfer, and social acceptance. By end of 2024, over 80 percent of the 130 measures had been implemented — an implementation rate that is unusually high in German policy history.

The Capital Instruments: From Shortage to System

The centrepiece of capital market policy was the Future Fund. Via KfW Capital, it mobilises €10 billion in public funds, to be leveraged with private capital to up to €30 billion by 2030. This makes the Future Fund the largest European instrument for mobilising growth capital for startups.

For a specific gap — hardware-intensive technologies with long development cycles — we set up the DeepTech & Climate Fund (DTCF). With €1 billion, it invests in startups building materials, energy systems, or scaling new manufacturing processes. These companies structurally don’t fit into classic VC funds with 7-10 year terms. The DTCF fills this gap, with over 13 investments already made.

For the transition to European scale, we created the European Tech Champions Initiative: a European co-investment vehicle with €1 billion, enabling German and European scale-ups to close growth financings at sizes previously only achievable in the US.

The Institutional Levers: SPRIND and DATI

Money alone doesn’t solve an innovation problem. Germany also needed better institutional structures. With the SPRIND-Freiheitsgesetz (November 2023), we finally gave the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation the operational autonomy it needs to function like a DARPA — flexible hiring, accelerated procurement, independent investment decisions. I called it „a milestone in innovation policy“.

With DATI (German Agency for Transfer and Innovation, November 2024), we closed a gap in the transfer system: the new federal agency systematically accelerates knowledge transfer from science to market, with particular focus on universities of applied sciences.

Founding Infrastructure: The EXIST Startup Factories

Innovation starts at universities — but German universities had too few resources for systematic entrepreneurship support by international standards. With the EXIST Startup Factories, we ran a competition for 15 lighthouse hubs. From 26 applications, 15 were selected, collectively representing around 100 universities. These hubs will professionally accompany science spin-offs from idea to Series A financing.

What Remains

Despite this balance sheet, some things remain unfinished. The growth capital problem is addressed but not yet solved — the Future Fund needs time to develop its full leverage effect. Making public procurement more innovation-friendly is a generational task. And the international scaling of European startups remains the central challenge of the European ecosystem.

This is precisely where SAI Europe comes in: we work at the intersection of innovation and policy, to activate the levers that don’t work in the market alone.

„Only an innovative Europe is a sovereign Europe. This holds not as a slogan, but as a strategic necessity.“— Dr. Anna Christmann