Top 15: Europe’s biggest startup cities

The first time I tried to come up with a ranking of Europe’s biggest startup capitals was about a year ago. The article generated a lot of interest and there were even two big European venture capital firms that contacted me regarding the ranking. Now, almost a year later, it’s time for an update to see what has changed since then.

In order to make the new ranking, I collected the following info and stuffed it into an Excel sheet: a) The top 70 European cities – in relation to this year’s visits on EU-Startups.com – and the associated number of visits; b) The number of startups that are registered for each of these European cities on CrunchBase; c) The number of startups registered on AngelList for each city. After that, I gave each of the three numbers different weights to get the right ratio. In order to come up with a more accurate ranking this time, I gave the number of visits a slightly lower weight as in 2011.

Please note, that the resulting ranking doesn’t say something about the real importance of each of these cities for the European startup world. It’s more like a mirror of the digital presence of these cities in the English speaking startup universe. And here we are:

1. London ()               6. Barcelona ()                 11. Milan ()

2. Paris ()                   7. Stockholm ()                12. Copenhagen ()

3. Berlin ()                 8. Munich ()                      13. Hamburg ()

4. Amsterdam ()        9. Dublin ()                       14. Zurich ()

5. Madrid ()             10. Helsinki ()                     15. Vienna ()

If you compare this ranking with the results of 2011, you’ll notice that the first four ranks stayed the same. Between rank five and fifteen there were quite a lot changes. The reasons for these changes are (1.) a slightly more accurate calculation of the ranking as in 2011 and (2) the development of each of these startup cities within the last year.