What Is the Rhine Group, and Why It Matters

The Rhine Group launched in August 2026 to push for a stronger European response to the continent's widening competitiveness gap. Jentic CEO Sean Blanchfield gave EU-Startups his read on what it gets right, and what Europe still needs.

Why the group exists

The Rhine Group launched on 24 August 2026 with 55 members drawn from business, academia, economics and former policymaking. It is co-chaired by Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president behind 2024's The Future of European Competitiveness, and Patrick Collison, co-founder and chief executive of Stripe. Its first working session runs from 20 to 23 September 2026.

Its purpose is narrower than another diagnosis. Draghi's original report already set out why Europe is losing ground across digital infrastructure, energy, capital markets, defence, industrial policy and education. The Rhine Group's stated ambition is to move those recommendations from proposals toward implementation.

The gap it is aiming at is stark: by the group's own count, only four of the world's 50 largest technology companies are European.

Sean's take

On the scale of the response required:

The Rhine Group's urgency is justified. Two years ago, the Draghi competitiveness report called for €750 billion in new annual investment in energy, technology, and defence, dwarfing the post-WWII Marshall Plan in real terms. This reflects the actual scale of the intervention required to secure our future stability and prosperity.

On what Europe actually needs:

Europe has always had the innovation and talent. What we need is the belief to back ourselves, and the willingness to invest to fund that belief. We need our emerging companies to find great public and private customers at home, and to have a real choice to stay European as they succeed.

That last point is the one we keep coming back to at Jentic. Europe is good at producing companies and much worse at keeping them. The missing pieces are rarely talent or research. They are growth capital, domestic customers willing to buy from European startups, and an integrated market a company can scale across without relocating to find one.

The criticism is worth hearing too

EU-Startups also covers the early pushback, and it is fair. Central and Eastern Europe is thinly represented: French and German members form the largest national blocs, former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves is the sole voice from countries that joined the EU in 2004 or later, and Poland has no representative at all despite its growth and its expanding technology sector.

There is a sharper irony in the group's own setup. A forum convened to strengthen European strategic autonomy is headquartered in Switzerland and runs its website on American infrastructure.

We would not treat that as a gotcha so much as a measurement of the problem. European organisations reach for platforms built elsewhere because the European alternatives often are not there, or are not yet good enough to choose on merit. Closing that gap is the work. Sovereignty means having credible European options and the freedom to pick between them, not raising a flag over inferior technology.

What we are watching for

The Draghi report supplied the diagnosis. The harder task is turning competitiveness from a policy conversation into conditions a founder can actually feel: capital that shows up at growth stage, public and private buyers that procure from European startups, and energy and compute priced so that building here is not a penalty.

That is the standard we will judge the September session against.

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Sean Blanchfield was quoted in What is the Rhine Group? And how is it addressing Europe's innovation gap? by David Cendon Garcia, published by EU-Startups on 26 August 2026. Read the full article for the complete membership list and analysis.