EABID, the European Association of Business Innovation Districts
- Jun 9
- 3 min read
Europe has a well-known startup scaling problem. Capital is fragmented across jurisdictions, investors struggle to build conviction (and pipelines) outside their home markets, and cultural and language barriers make it difficult for companies and funds to operate pan-continentally. The result is a continent that produces world-class innovation but fails to scale it at the pace of the United States or China.
EABID, the European Association of Business Innovation Districts, was founded to change that. It connects and aligns business and innovation districts across Europe, with a focus on improving their competitiveness, facilitating the growth of pan-European companies, and attracting, pooling, and deploying investments.
The association now includes 25 business district and related organizations across 14 countries. The three founding organizations include:
Sandyford Business District in Greater Dublin, which hosts 27,000 employees across 1,000 companies, including the EMEA HQs of several American tech giants like Microsoft and Mastercard
Oeiras Valley Innovation Lab in Greater Lisbon, whose commercial footprint accounts for almost 15% of Portugal's GDP
CEDAES, the Spanish Association of Business Districts, which represents more than 6,000 districts across Spain
EABID's Value
Our work with EABID is built on a simple but powerful insight: the main barrier to pan-European investment is not a lack of capital or opportunity, it’s information asymmetry driven by cultural and geographic fragmentation.
Investors outside a given market don’t know which companies to back. Companies don’t know which investors are open to their sector or stage. And deals that should happen don’t, because no one with the right local knowledge is in the room.
EABID’s network of business districts solves this. Each member district has deep-rooted local relationships with its corporate tenants, SMEs, startups, and investors, which have been built over years of on-the-ground engagement. By pooling that local intelligence across a pan-European network, we can effectively neutralize the cultural borders that fragment the European investment market, creating a single connected pipeline of opportunities for investors, corporates, and operators who want to deploy or expand across the continent.
Investment Pipeline Development
We are building out EABID’s investment infrastructure across two tracks.
The first is helping foreign investors to access Europe. We are currently working with a US-based VC fund looking to enter the European market, sourcing European limited partners to anchor the fund and establishing the local relationships it needs to build credible deal flow on the ground.
The second is helping European investors to deploy more broadly outside their home markets. Due to historic gaps in support for venture capital in Europe, it is normal for governments to step in as LPs in funds to help stimulate startup creation. However, this money typically comes with significant strings attached: all money must go to local startups rather than the best startups regardless of geography. Such stipulations have led to too much money flooding some European markets and not enough money going to other markets. Our role with EABID is to facilitate cross-border LP fundraising as well as cross-border investments into startups across Europe to help ensure that funds have access to the best companies rather than being constrained to their local markets only.
Both mandates reflect the same underlying model: investors bring capital and mandate, and we bring the local presence and trust networks that make cross-border deployment possible.
Pooling District Resources
Beyond fund-level work, we are developing a model for EABID member districts to pool the investment capacity of their local business communities, using the corporate and SME base of each district not only as a source of startup customers and partners, but as a collective investor base that can co-invest in the most promising companies across the network.
This approach is particularly valuable for companies and investors who have historically struggled to access markets outside their home country. A startup in Lisbon gains a warm introduction to a corporate in Dublin. A fund in Madrid gets curated deal flow from a district in Brussels. The network does the work that cultural proximity used to require.
Three Mast Group continues to develop EABID’s investment framework and member engagement as the association advances its implementation agenda across Europe.
