European AI startups

The US and China lead the AI headlines. Europe leads in places nobody is looking. Open-weight LLMs from Paris. Frontier image models from Freiburg. Prompt-to-app unicorns from Stockholm. Defence AI from Munich. Quantum computers from Espoo. Drug discovery from San Sebastián. The reference translation engine from Cologne.

Below: European AI companies already shipping at global scale. Most are under five years old. None of them needed Silicon Valley to do it.