The first European Startup and Scaleup Scoreboard, published by the European Commission in 2026, analyzes the startup and scaleup ecosystems of the 27 member states using 36 indicators. They are grouped into six dimensions: innovation-friendly regulation, talent, access to infrastructure, networks and services, financing, speed to access and scale in the market, and impact.
The European result is generally positive. The European Union’s average score in 2025 improved by 13.5 percentage points compared with 2020, and 20 of the 27 member states raised their performance.
But the report also identifies a persistent difficulty: access to financing, especially in the later growth stages. In this context, Spain’s situation shows both bright spots and shadows.
Spain improves, but gaps remain
The Commission describes Spain’s performance as uneven. The results are generally around the EU average or below it.
The dimension of innovation-friendly regulation is where Spain achieves its relatively strongest result. The country slightly surpasses the EU mean, pointing to comparatively favorable regulatory conditions for entrepreneurial activity.
The picture changes in other areas. For example, Spain lags the EU average in access to infrastructure, networks and services and in the ability to attract top talent. The differences are larger in three growth-related dimensions: financing, speed to access and market expansion and impact.
The diagnosis is especially relevant because the European problem no longer rests solely on creating innovative companies. The challenge is to ensure that a larger share of them can grow, secure capital, enter new markets, and scale.
That challenge also appears in the European comparison. Countries like Denmark demonstrate how different conditions can combine. Its global index reaches 148.2% of the European average. It shows particularly strong results in regulation and talent and high levels of venture capital investment in early stages.
The Netherlands offer another example. They have fewer startups and scaleups per million inhabitants than the EU average, but concentrate more high-valued companies. They also record venture capital investment levels above the European average in both early and later stages.
This shows that the sheer volume of startups does not by itself explain the strength of an ecosystem. What happens after creation also matters.
Financing growth remains pending
Access to financing appears as a cross-cutting issue in the Scoreboard. At the European level, the Commission identifies the availability of capital, especially in later stages, as a constraint for startups and scaleups. The aggregated value of the European ecosystem is roughly 20% of the United States and 60% of China.
Spain begins from this European challenge, but its national report also notes weaker performance than the EU average specifically in the financing dimension.
This places business growth at the center of the debate. A startup may have validated its technology, acquired customers, or shown there is a market. The next step requires different resources. Expanding production, internationalizing operations, developing new capabilities, or accelerating time to market may require financing volumes that no longer align with the early stages of entrepreneurship.
The Scoreboard does not aim to solve that need nor substitute the financial analysis of each company. Its usefulness lies in showing which ecosystem elements facilitate or hinder the growth of companies capable of scaling.
It also allows avoiding an overly simplistic interpretation of rankings. The Commission itself presents this first edition as a pilot exercise. There are limitations in data availability and harmonization, and an aggregated index cannot reflect all the peculiarities of each country.
For that reason, national reports are especially useful.
In the Spanish case, the message is not that entrepreneurial capacity is lacking. The report notes relatively favorable regulatory conditions, but it detects gaps in the factors that enable moving from an innovative company to a more expansion-ready business.
Reducing that gap will require action on more than one element: financing, access to markets, talent and infrastructure are all part of the same equation.
The EU Startup and Scaleup Strategy places growth of innovative companies among its priorities. The new Scoreboard will enable observation, in future editions, of whether Spain’s conditions converge with those of European ecosystems currently delivering better results. For companies, that evolution also raises a practical question: what mix of public and private funding can accompany each growth stage.
David Seoane Vilariño, Business Development EIC Accelerator & Startups Programmes EU Projects at Euro-Funding
