Miraise at Slush 2025: Europe's AI Frontier from Helsinki
TLDR
- Miraise’s CEO Iwata and EIR Matsui attended Slush 2025 in Helsinki, reporting an event dominated by AI across all sectors with 13,000 attendees.
Key Takeaways
- Slush 2025 ran November 19-20 at Helsinki Expo and Convention Center, drawing 13,000+ attendees including 6,000+ founders and investors.
- Every exhibitor and sponsor framed their pitch as “AI combined with X”; dominant verticals were Deep Tech, HR, decarbonization, and health; entertainment and C-to-C were absent.
- Pitch contest winner Diffraqtion uses quantum sensing to deliver 20x higher camera resolution and 1,000x faster processing than conventional cameras, and raised €1M from General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.
- Europe’s key competitive challenges: insufficient startup funding scale, regulatory burden (GDPR seen as misfit for AI era), and the need to fast-track the “28th Regime” cross-border startup framework.
- US immigration restrictions are seen as an unexpected advantage for Europe, drawing skilled tech talent unwilling to relocate to the US.
Why It Matters
- The AI-bubble question split the room: founders largely dismissed bubble concerns while investors expressed caution, signaling a widening sentiment gap at the top of the cycle.
- Europe’s “28th Regime” proposal, pension fund deployment, and public procurement reform are the concrete levers being debated to close the funding gap with the US and China.
- Japanese city governments (Tokyo, Kyoto, Fukuoka) ran official side events at Slush, reflecting active institutional effort to connect Japanese founders to the European ecosystem.
Matsui (EIR, Miraise), miraise.vc · 2026-02-08 · Read the original