Portugal Joins the EU's €15 Billion Tech-Champions Fund After Sitting Out the First Round

Portugal has signed up to the second round of the European Union's flagship effort to keep its fastest-growing technology companies from running out of money — and running off to the United States — just as the initiative is being scaled up fourfold.

The vehicle is the European Technology Champions Initiative 2.0 (ETCI 2.0), managed by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and backed by a group of member states. Portugal was on the outside looking in when the first version launched in 2023, but this time it is among the founding participants of the enlarged fund, the government confirmed on Thursday.

The numbers are deliberately large. ETCI 2.0 is targeting €15 billion in commitments, four times the size of the original, and the EIB reckons the money will pull in enough private capital to mobilise around €80 billion across the bloc. The cash will not go directly into start-ups; instead it will seed more than 100 investment funds — including up to 45 so-called mega-funds — which then back an estimated 1,500 expansion-stage European companies, at an average of roughly €200 million each. The EIB itself is putting in €1.25 billion.

Why the fund exists

The problem it is built to solve is a familiar complaint in European boardrooms. Europe is reasonably good at producing promising young companies but poor at funding them once they need the very large cheques — the €100 million-plus rounds — that turn a scale-up into a global player. Founders who reach that stage have long crossed the Atlantic to find American growth investors, and often their headquarters, jobs and eventual stock-market listings have gone with them.

The first ETCI, despite its modest size, offered a proof of concept: it supported 15 mega-funds that between them helped produce a dozen European unicorns — private companies valued at more than €1 billion. ETCI 2.0 widens the net, for the first time also backing mid-sized growth funds of €300 million or more, and adds a pan-European digital platform meant to make it easier for institutional investors to take part.

Finance Minister Joaquim Miranda Sarmento framed Portugal's entry as a practical bet rather than a symbolic one. Lisbon supports ETCI 2.0, he said, "as a practical initiative to deepen European capital markets," mobilise private investment and help innovative companies scale and compete internationally.

For Portugal, the calculation is straightforward. The country has built a visible start-up scene around Lisbon and Porto — anchored by the Web Summit and a steady flow of early-stage funding — but its home-grown successes still tend to raise their biggest rounds abroad. Being inside the tent means Portuguese venture funds and the companies they back stand a better chance of tapping the pool, rather than watching the capital flow to larger neighbours.

The final size of the fund will be settled at a "first closing" expected in the second half of 2026, once member states and private backers have confirmed their commitments. Only then will it be clear how much Portugal itself is prepared to put on the table — a figure the government has yet to disclose.