EU Inc. ‘a big step in the right direction’ – serial entrepreneur Jacob Appel

Serial entrepreneur Jacob Appel has welcomed the freshly unveiled plans to create EU Inc. – the bloc’s new business strategy that promises to wipe barriers between member states when creating, scaling and exiting companies. 

“For years, Europe has been great at talent and terrible at execution when it comes to startups. We’ve started companies in 4 or 5 European countries, and every time the hassle almost makes you not want to expand at all,” Mr Appel, Binderr CEO, said.

“A simpler, more standard way to start, scale, and eventually exit a company in Europe is long overdue. When starting a company feels easier in Delaware than in your own home country, something is broken.”

If done right, the entrepreneur said, EU Inc. can:

• Lower the barrier to starting a company

• Make cross-border scaling less painful

• Make European startups more attractive to global investors

• Give founders a clearer path to exits and serious capital

The highly anticipated plan for a pan-European company structure that would let startups incorporate and scale across the bloc under a single rulebook.

This was unveiled in European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s speech in Davos on Tuesday, calling the EU-INC a central part of its new business strategy for the first time.

“The ultimate aim is to create a new truly European company structure – we call it EU Inc… with a single and simple set of rules that will apply seamlessly all over our Union,” Ms Von der Leyen said.

Another serial entrepreneur Luca Arrigo had told MaltaCEOs.mt of his own struggle to secure finance for Metaverse Architects, a firm he founded and went on to sell.

“It is extremely difficult for entrepreneurs in Europe. There is so much back-and-forth with lawyers and notaries, so much due diligence, that investors simply prefer to look elsewhere,” he said.

Over 16,000 signatures from across the startup world have been gathered in support of the scheme so far, including impact investors World Fund, Pale Blue Dot, Planet A Ventures, Oyster Bay Venture Capital and many more.

Ms Von der Leyen said the goal is for companies to be able to register a business digitally within 48 hours in any member state and face the same capital rules across the EU.

That would make it as easy to scale in Europe as in unified markets like the US or China.

If the reform succeeds, Ms Von der Leyen added, it could both help European scaleups stay and attract more international capital.

She said Europe starts from a strong position, with major companies in everything from wind power and next-generation batteries to aerospace and the industrial machinery needed to build chips or advanced weapons systems, as well as firms deploying AI at the same pace as their US competitors. What Europe needs, she said, is speed.

“Europe is in the race for tomorrow’s key technologies. But as global competition becomes ever more ruthless, we must show real ambition.”

Featured Image: Jacob Appel / Facebook