Solo, Male, With a Master’s: 75% of European Founders Go It Alone

A new Cherry Ventures report says the typical European start-up is not a scrappy founding duo in a garage. It is more often one person, usually a man, and usually armed with a master’s degree. The Berlin-based VC looked at 10,000 European companies in their first 18 months, covering 10,000 founders across 89 cities and more than €5 billion in capital raised.

The headline number is blunt: 75% of young companies start with a single founder. Another 19% begin with two, and just 6% have three or more. But the report also shows that money changes behaviour. Among companies without institutional backing, 79% are solo-founded. Once a first funding round is closed, that share falls to 46%.

Women remain heavily underrepresented. They make up 10.1% of founders overall, with the lowest share in AI applications at 7.5% and the highest in health at 16.6%. The report also pushes back on the familiar 13% figure, saying it measures female share of funding rather than female share of founders.

Credentials still matter, just not always the ones people expect. Master’s degrees appear 4.3 times as often among founders as MBAs. In deep tech, doctorates show up almost 10 times for every MBA. And when people do team up, they are far more likely to have met at work than at university: shared former employers are 3.2 times as common as shared universities.

The geography is lopsided too. Amsterdam and Zurich lead on founders per capita, while London is the biggest hub in raw numbers, accounting for about one in five company formations in Europe. AI-first software has now overtaken SaaS as the biggest category, Munich stands out for hardware, and only 7% of founders in the sample went through an accelerator program. Cherry Ventures says the data came from its own deal flow and was cross-checked with Crunchbase, Dealroom, Harmonic and Evertrace, so the picture is sharp but not complete.