Why Ambitious Irish Tech Founders Are Now Seeking Series A in Continental Europe, Not London or Silicon Valley
London is losing its grip on Irish Series A funding. Not slowly, not politely. The shift is structural, and founders who spot it early will raise on better terms than those still flying into Heathrow with a deck and a prayer.
The Old Map Is Wrong
For two decades, the default Irish fundraising route looked like this: seed from Enterprise Ireland or a local angel, then London for Series A, then Silicon Valley if you were lucky. The logic was proximity and familiarity. London VCs spoke the same English, understood common law term sheets, and could get a flight to Dublin before lunch.
That map was always a compromise. London VCs historically applied a haircut to Irish valuations. Not out of malice, just arithmetic. A smaller domestic market, further from the US than they liked, no natural exit pipeline into the FTSE 100. Irish founders accepted the discount because they thought they had no alternative.
The alternative now exists, and it is bigger than most founders realise.
What Changed in Paris and Berlin
France's tech funding hit €8.3 billion in 2023, a figure that was unthinkable a decade ago. Germany's Sequoia-backed rounds, Balderton's Berlin presence, and Northzone operating across Stockholm, London and Paris created a continental infrastructure that simply did not exist in 2015. Funds like HV Capital, Partech and Earlybird are writing Series A cheques of €5 million to €20 million into B2B software, climate tech and fintech with the same rhythm that Octopus or Notion Capital once owned.
The practical consequence for Irish founders is that a company with €800,000 in annual recurring revenue, growing at 80 percent year on year, is now a competitive asset on a European roadshow, not just a consolation prize for investors who missed the London deal. European funds are looking for distribution into the English-speaking market. An Irish company is, by definition, already there.
The Three Reasons Irish Founders Are Winning European Rounds
1. The regulatory passport is real. An Irish-registered company sits inside the EU. A founder raising from a German or French LP-backed fund does not need to restructure anything to satisfy the fund's mandate. Post-Brexit, a London VC putting money into an Irish company occasionally creates friction with their own LPs around EU market access. That friction does not exist with a Munich or Amsterdam investor. The structure is clean from day one.
2. Enterprise Ireland's European network is underused. EI has offices in Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam and Stockholm. Most founders treat those offices as trade contacts. The sharper operators are using them as warm introduction pipelines into the exact funds writing Series A cheques in those cities. A cold email to a Partech associate converts at a fraction of the rate of a referral from someone the partner already trusts, and EI staff have built those relationships over years.
3. Valuations are more rational. This sounds like an insult but it is not. European Series A funds are not paying 2021 San Francisco multiples. They are pricing on revenue, growth rate and market size, the same fundamentals that Irish founders built their businesses on. Irish founders who struggled with US venture capital terms often found the governance expectations and liquidation preferences punishing. European term sheets tend to be cleaner, and a founder who keeps more control at Series A has a better chance of surviving to Series B on their own terms.
The Four-Step European Raise
The order of these steps matters. Skip step two and you will find yourself in a meeting with a fund that loves the product and cannot legally write the cheque because your sector falls outside their mandate.
Step 1. Map the fund, not the city. Partech focuses on software and deep tech. Earlybird has a dedicated digital tech fund and a health tech fund. HV Capital writes into consumer and B2B. Knowing which fund is actively deploying into your category, at your stage, in the current vintage of their fund is the difference between a meeting and a conversation. The data is public. Crunchbase, Dealroom and the funds' own portfolio pages show exactly where the money went in the last 18 months.
Step 2. Qualify the mandate before you travel. A 20-minute call with an associate to confirm the fund is deploying at your stage saves two weeks of calendar. Ask directly: are you making new Series A investments from your current fund? What sectors are you prioritising this year? Founders who skip this step waste time in meetings with partners whose fund is 80 percent deployed and will not write a new cheque until their next raise.
Step 3. Build the European revenue story. Continental European funds want to see that you have thought about their market, not just used it as a backdrop. One paying customer in Germany or France is worth ten slide-deck references to the European opportunity. It signals distribution capability, not just ambition.
Step 4. Run the process in parallel, not in sequence. The biggest mistake Irish founders make on European raises is treating each fund as a sequential conversation. Run six to eight meetings in the same four-week window. Competing term sheets create genuine urgency. A solo conversation with one fund, however promising, gives the fund every incentive to slow-walk the process while they do more diligence. Parallel processes fix that.
Who Is Actually Doing This
The €5bn EU Scaleup Fund created a further pull. Irish deeptech and climate founders are now in conversations with pan-European vehicles that specifically need geographic diversification across member states. A Dublin founder with a climate or AI application is not competing against a German counterpart for the same cheque. They are complementary assets to a fund that needs to deploy across the bloc.
The founders winning these rounds share one characteristic. They stopped thinking of Europe as an export market and started building it into the company's identity from seed stage. European customers on the books, a GDPR-native data architecture, and a founding team that has spent time in at least one continental city before the raise. These are not cosmetic changes. They are signals that reduce due diligence risk for a fund whose LPs are German pension funds or French family offices.
The Fear Is Real
The honest part: European relationships take longer to build than a Ryanair flight to Stansted ever suggested. Cultural fluency matters. A French or German investor reads a room differently, moves at a different pace, and weights technical depth more heavily than a typical London growth investor. Irish founders who walk in with a US-style sales pitch and expect fast decisions will be disappointed. The upside is that when a continental fund commits, they tend to stay committed through difficult quarters. The relationship is less transactional than the Anglo-American version.
The window is open. Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam are building the infrastructure that London spent the last 20 years accumulating. Irish founders who move now are not chasing a trend. They are reading the geography correctly while the majority are still looking the wrong direction across the Irish Sea.
