Today, the subject of semiconductors is widely being discussed. "Hard Tech" generally refers to organizations creating breakthrough products that require immense imagination and innovation, not to mention "hard work." Self-driving cars, quantum computing, battery elimination in electron- ics or artificial hearts for implants are all hard tech examples.

Europe does not have a good position when it comes to Hard Tech: among the 729 world unicorns, only 86 are European (of which only 3 in Hardware), and none are in the world top 20.

However, Europe has 2.6M manufacturing companies, which represents around 63M jobs and these companies are on the verge of massive transformation; Industry 4.0 revolution which requires amongst others new robotization and indoor traceability solutions based on Hardware breakthroughs.

Despite the arrival of leading US funds (such as Accel and Index Ventures) in the UK / Europe and the acceleration observed in a number of unicorns, very few european Hard Tech companies are scaling up and finding the right financing.

The scale of the challenge is therefore huge.