Luxembourg among Europe's startup "front-runners" in new EU Scoreboard

A key deliverable under the EU Startup and Scaleup Strategy, the scoreboard is a benchmarking tool that tracks how startup and scaleup ecosystems are developing across the 27 member states. Although this is the tool's first edition, published end of May 2026, it is not a single-year snapshot. It uses 2020 as a baseline and tracks each country's score annually through to 2025. It is built on 36 indicators spanning six dimensions: innovation-friendly regulation, better financing options, faster market expansion, support for top European talent, access to infrastructure, networks and services, and impact. The scoreboard draws on data from the Joint Research Centre, Eurostat, Dealroom and the European Startup Nations Alliance.

A five-year climb

Countries are ranked into four performance tiers based on their final index score relative to the EU average: front-runners (above 125% of the EU average), high-performing (100% to 125%), catching-up (70% to 100%), rising (below 70%).

Luxembourg sits comfortably in the front-runner tier, alongside Estonia (182), Sweden (180.2), Finland (176.7), the Netherlands (176.2) and Denmark (168.2). At 167.9, it trails Denmark by only 0.3 points, making it the closest of the six front-runners to breaking into the top five.

Since 2020, the scoreboard's baseline year, 20 of the 27 member states have improved their performance, and Luxembourg's own trajectory reflects that momentum clearly: from 154.2 (2021) to 169.9(2024). That is a gain of nearly 14 points, with the sharpest jump coming between 2022 and 2023. The 2025 score sits just below 2024's peak, a modest pull-back that still leaves Luxembourg at its second-highest level on record and comfortably ahead of every year before 2023.

Where Luxembourg leads

Beyond the headline score, the scoreboard's indicator-level breakdown shows Luxembourg topping the EU on several fronts.

1^st in the EU:

• Share of foreign-born people with tertiary education among foreign-born employed people
• Persons with tertiary education employed in science and technology, as a share of the labour force
• Local VC funds as a share of GDP
• Value added per person employed in SMEs
• Share of women-founded VC-backed companies
• Economic impacts
• Diversity

2^nd in the EU:

• Share of VC-backed companies with an angel round
• Number of VC-backed companies per million population
• Patent applications to the EPO per million population
• Number of exits per million population
• Framework conditions (overall dimension)
• VC investments — a strength the country will look to build on when investors and founders gather for Luxembourg Venture Days in October
• International competitiveness

3^rd in the EU:

• Seed, startup and other early-stage VC investments as a share of GDP
• Fast market uptake and expansion

Together, these results paint a picture of an ecosystem whose edge comes from the depth and international makeup of its talent pool, the strength of its local VC base and the value its companies generate, rather than from early-stage funding volumes alone.

Talent as a strength

Luxembourg ranks 4^th in the EU for best talent, one of the 36 indicators, a solid result worth noting as this strength lines up with how national policy has been shaped in recent years. The government's "From Seed to Scale" roadmap, backed by a 10-point action plan, sets out talent attraction as one of its explicit priorities alongside financing and internationalisation, and sits alongside startup acceleration programmes such as Fit 4 Start that bring international founders into the ecosystem. Its startup ecosystem is growing steadily with around 860 startups. In addition, foreign nationals make up close to half of Luxembourg's population and nearly 70% of its workforce, six in ten workers hold a university degree, one of the highest shares in Europe, and the country has repeatedly placed among the top handful of nations worldwide in the IMD World Talent Ranking.

The EU ecosystem in numbers

Beyond country rankings, the scoreboard also captures the scale of the EU's startup and scaleup ecosystem as a whole. Across the 27 member states there are 226,000 startups and 355 unicorns, backed by €6.1 billion in early-stage VC investment and a further €4.7 billion in later-stage funding.

The European Startup and Scaleup Scoreboard’s full country-by-country breakdown and interactive rankings are available on the Commission's website.