Welcome to ‘The Startup State’ - a weekly bulletin from the GEN Policy and Research team highlighting key entrepreneurship news, reports, commentary and features from around the world.
GEN community news
- Global Entrepreneurship Congress returns to the U.S. for the first time in 15 years this summer. Join thousands of founders, investors, ecosystem builders and policymakers from 200 countries in Indianapolis, June 2-5 (GEN)
- GEN and Youth Business International are hosting a webinar on February 27 that will explore and discuss the joint Youth Entrepreneurship Framework that launched late last year (GEN)
News
- Syria hosted its first international tech conference in 50 years this week. SYNC 25’s organizing team - a group of Syrian-American entrepreneurs and investors working in Silicon Valley - aims to help create 25,000 new jobs in Syria’s technology sector over the next five years (RestOfWorld)
- The Netherlands’ prime minister has promised action to help tech startups and lure venture capital after TechLeap’s ‘State of Dutch Tech Report 2025’ showed the sector was flagging. While total venture capital investment increased by 47% in 2024, only 104 new Dutch companies secured funding of more than $100,000, down from 172 in 2023 (Reuters)
- Seoul has announced an ambitious AI strategy that aims to train 10,000 AI professionals each year - 4,000 through the Seoul Software Academy and 6,000 through university programs. The strategy also promises a Seoul AI Tech City and a $344m AI investment fund (KoreaTechDesk)
Paris AI Action Summit
- French president Emmanuel Macron urged Europe to simplify its regulations to get back into the AI race (TechCrunch) and unveiled a $112bn AI investment package, France’s answer to Stargate (TechCrunch)
- 60 European companies signed up to the ‘EU AI Champions Initiative’, calling for simpler EU rules on AI (AI Champions Initiative)
- U.S. vice president J.D. Vance railed against ‘excessive’ AI regulation (Time)
- 70 governments, international bodies and research institutes - notably excluding the U.S. and the UK - signed a ‘Statement on inclusive and sustainable AI for people and the planet’ (Elysee)
- The EU launched ‘InvestAI’, an initiative to mobilize €200bn for investment in AI, including €20bn for AI gigafactories (EU)
- The EU scrapped proposed rules that would have empowered consumers to claim compensation for harm caused by AI (Sifted)
Comment and analysis
- At the Paris AI action summit, the global south rises (Trisha Ray, associate director, Geotech Center, Atlantic Council)
- Why doesn’t Europe have a Silicon Valley (Paul O’Brien, Startup Economist)
- Africa’s tech sector is powering up in 2025 (Adesoji Solanke, head of fintech & banks, Absa)
- Britain’s tech unicorns are galloping overseas (Baroness Stowell, outgoing chair, House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee)
- European defense tech startups: In it for the long run? (David Chinn and Jokob Stober, McKinsey & Company)
- What Trump gets right about Europe (John Thornhill, editorial director, Sifted)
- Beyond startups: The real impact of research translation (Poppy Sykes, ON innovation program manager, CSIRO)
- Indian startup ‘handholders’ behaving like possessive nannies (Chaitanya Giri, space and emerging technology fellow, Observer Research Foundation)
Features
- Scaling is the next big challenge for Lithuania’s deep tech startups (Science | Business)
- How the world stopped worrying and learned to love AI (Politico EU)
GEN Atlas insights
The GEN Atlas is the world’s largest entrepreneurship policy compendium, featuring over 400 case studies from 70 countries. Using these case studies, we publish Country Deep Dives examining the policies underpinning countries’ entrepreneurial success, Policy Deep Dives comparing different countries’ approaches to common policy challenges, and Atlas Spotlights highlighting the best examples of policies under a broad theme. Recent highlights:
- Policy deep dives: Employee share schemes | Startup visas | Youth entrepreneurship | Supporting ethnic minority entrepreneurs
- Country deep dives: South Africa | France | The Netherlands | Australia | Spain
- Atlas spotlights: Finance
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The opinions expressed in the articles above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Global Entrepreneurship Network.