This week’s summit brought together investors, EU officials and representatives of firms that have received “venture debt” from the EU’s economic development bank, according to the EIB’s 22 March 2017 press release.

The bank’s venture debt programme started in December 2016 as part of the so-called “Juncker plan” to boost Europe’s economy, which created the European Fund for Strategic Investments.

In its press release, the EIB reported lending a total of €750m “in long-term venture debt financing” last year. The announcement stated that:

“The investments are expected to generate more than 6,500 high-quality jobs as well as around EUR 7bn in additional investments in R&D. They also make the EU bank the largest venture debt investor in Europe.”

And that:

“The venture debt product of the EIB supports early-stage, highly innovative companies in sectors such as life science, biotech, software, 3D printing, robotics, clean technologies and artificial intelligence.”

Hristo Stoykov of the European Investment Bank explained the philosophy behind the venture debt scheme in a video posted on Youtube on 22 March 2018:

“Usually at the time when we decide to give money to a certain company, the company has no sales, no assets, but they have a great idea, [a] patented idea, and they need to market it, and there’s where we come in. We bet on the future of the company, like the way any bank when giving a student a loan bets on the future earnings of that person. So we bet on the fact that they have invested their knowledge, their skills, their time and money into developing a certain product, [which] will bring us benefits as a lender and as a union.”

In the same video, Ludovic Deblois, CEO of Sunpartner Technologies, a solar engineering firm near Marseille that received a loan of €15m, said the programme allows entrepreneurs to receive an “investment to develop” without losing control of their firm, “and that’s important when you have a long-term vision”.

The summit was held Thursday at the EIB’s headquarters in Kirchberg.