Europe is ruling itself out of the AI race

I recently reported on a major partnership signed by a German tech startup. Or so I thought. Not long after publication, I got a message from the company: ‘You have wrongly said we were founded in Germany. In fact, we were founded in California. Please correct this.’

That’s strange, I thought. Everyone I spoke to sounded pretty German – and indeed the person I emailed was based at the firm’s Berlin offices. But they were adamant: this was a California-based business.

The perception is that America has strong innovation, and Europe has strong regulation

I did some digging and discovered the company had been registered in Germany at least a year before it even opened an office in the US. Eventually the firm conceded that it was in fact founded in Germany, though it had since shifted operations across the pond. Perhaps this was a simple factual error by my interlocutors, but it made me wonder: are European tech firms embarrassed about being seen to be European?

There are lots of reasons not to start a technology business in Europe, compared to the US.