Mismanagement in European Deeptech: A Post-Mortem on Ambition and Execution

Introduction

Europe possesses a formidable foundation for deep technology leadership, built upon world-class research institutions and a deep reservoir of scientific and engineering talent.¹ Yet, despite this potential, a significant number of its most ambitious and well-funded deeptech ventures collapse in spectacular fashion. The prevailing narrative often points to the "European paradox"—a continent strong in research but weak in commercialization, hamstrung by a risk-averse funding environment that starves promising companies of capital.³ This report argues that this narrative, while containing elements of truth, frequently serves as a convenient scapegoat for a more fundamental and damaging ailment: a systemic deficit of managerial acumen, operational discipline, and strategic clarity within the ventures themselves.

The issue is rarely a simple lack of money. A forensic examination of high-profile failures reveals that even when billions of euros in public and private capital are secured, the outcome is often the same. This points to a deeper malaise where a risk-averse investment culture forces founders into a cycle of hype and grandiose promises to secure funding. This, in turn, sets them on a path of unrealistic expectations and high-burn-rate operations that are destined to fail without flawless execution—a skill the ecosystem simultaneously fails to cultivate.⁴ Once funded, these companies are under immense pressure to demonstrate traction, leading to a "cash burn" mentality and a premature focus on expansion before core technology or unit economics are proven.⁵ This creates a fragile structure where any operational hiccup, inevitable in deeptech, can trigger a collapse.

This report will conduct a post-mortem on several of Europe's most prominent deeptech collapses. Through detailed case studies of Northvolt, the battery champion that crumbled under operational chaos, and Lilium, the flying taxi pioneer whose academic dreams failed to achieve liftoff, we will uncover patterns of mismanagement. Further analysis of Arrival, Infarm, Prophesee, and Blickfeld will demonstrate that these are not isolated incidents but cautionary tales of ambition untethered from execution, offering critical lessons for founders, investors, and policymakers across the European deeptech ecosystem.

The European Deeptech Paradox: A Fertile Ground for Failure?

The European deeptech landscape is characterized by a frustrating contradiction: immense potential undercut by systemic weaknesses. While the external factors of capital scarcity and market fragmentation are significant, they do not exist in a vacuum. Instead, they serve to amplify the consequences of internal mismanagement, creating an environment where poorly run companies have no safety net and even promising ones face a punishing climb.

The Capital Conundrum: Risk Aversion and the "Valley of Death"

A primary challenge is the nature of the European venture capital ecosystem itself. Compared to their US counterparts, European VC funds are often smaller, more conservative, and demonstrably less successful at generating outsized returns. The average US VC fund returns 10.3% over a 10-year period, while UK funds return just 4.6%.⁴ This cautious approach has tangible consequences for startups. European deeptech ventures, which push the boundaries of science and engineering, raise four times less capital at the seed stage than their US counterparts. This initial funding gap slows their growth, reduces their chances of achieving market dominance, and prevents many world-changing ideas from ever reaching the market.⁴

This environment creates a perilous "valley of death," a chasm between the early-stage financing available from public R&D grants and the growth capital required from private VCs.³ Compounding this issue is a significant "knowledge gap" between innovators and investors. Many traditional VCs lack the specialized technical expertise to properly evaluate the complex, high-risk projects typical of deeptech, leading to information asymmetries that hinder their ability to assess viability and ultimately result in systemic underinvestment.⁷

Perhaps most damaging is a deep-seated cultural aversion to failure. Unlike the American "fail fast and pivot" ethos, failure in Europe is often stigmatized, making both entrepreneurs and investors profoundly risk-averse.⁸ This is codified in legal structures; in Germany, for instance, bankrupt entrepreneurs can face a six-year period of personal liability, effectively preventing them from starting afresh.⁹ This mindset discourages the kind of bold, ambitious bets that are necessary for breakthrough innovation, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of incrementalism.

Fragmentation and Brain Drain: A Disjointed Ecosystem

Beyond capital, European deeptech ventures face structural and human resource challenges. Europe is not a single, unified market like the United States or China. It is a fragmented collection of geographies, each with its own set of regulations, languages, and bureaucratic hurdles.³

This fragmentation slows down scaling and forces companies to navigate a complex and costly compliance landscape.³

This fragmentation is not merely a logistical hurdle but a critical strategic one. Deeptech companies, with their inherently high upfront R&D costs, must divert a significant portion of their limited early-stage funding to legal and administrative expenses for each new country they enter. A US-based competitor, by contrast, can deploy its entire seed round toward product development and scaling within a single, massive, harmonized market. This dynamic imposes a direct tax on innovation and speed, placing European startups at a permanent competitive disadvantage from their inception.

The result of these headwinds is a persistent "brain drain." Europe's world-class universities produce top-tier engineers and scientists, but many are lured away to the US, where they find better salaries, more ambitious projects, and fewer bureaucratic obstacles.⁸ Promising companies are often acquired by foreign entities before they can scale domestically. Approximately 60% of Europe's top deeptech acquisitions are made by non-European players, with iconic startups like Skype and DeepMind being absorbed by Microsoft and Google, respectively.⁸ This continuous exodus of talent and intellectual property prevents the formation of a self-perpetuating "founder flywheel"—an ecosystem where successful entrepreneurs reinvest their capital and expertise into the next generation of startups, a key driver of Silicon Valley's success.¹

Case Study – Northvolt: The Hubris of a Homegrown Champion

Positioned as Europe's great hope for battery sovereignty, Northvolt's collapse serves as a textbook case of operational mismanagement driven by executive hubris, a fundamental misunderstanding of complex manufacturing, and a catastrophic failure in execution. Despite securing unprecedented financial and political backing, the company's internal weaknesses proved fatal.

The Vision vs. The Reality: Overpromise, Underdeliver

The vision for Northvolt was undeniably grand. Founded by former Tesla executives Peter Carlsson and Paolo Cerruti, the company set out to build the "world's greenest battery" and establish a homegrown European champion to rival Asian dominance.¹⁵ With a mission to capture 25% of Europe's battery market by 2030, Northvolt amassed over $14 billion in public and private funding from backers including Volkswagen, Goldman Sachs, and the European Investment Bank.¹⁵

The reality, however, was a stark and brutal contrast. The company's flagship gigafactory in Skellefteå, Sweden, became a symbol of its inability to execute. In 2023, the plant delivered less than 1% of its 16 GWh capacity target, producing a mere 1 GWh.¹⁵ Throughout 2024, internal documents revealed that the factory was consistently missing its weekly production goals for shippable cells.¹⁹ The chronic underperformance had severe commercial consequences. In June 2024, BMW, a key customer, canceled a $2 billion battery supply contract, citing Northvolt's failure to meet its delivery commitments.¹⁵

A Culture of Hubris and Deception

At the core of Northvolt's operational failures was a culture of profound hubris. Insiders described an environment where the company's goal was to "surpass established practices rather than learn from them".²² This mindset, seemingly imported from Silicon Valley's more disruptive sectors, was ill-suited for the unforgiving realities of industrial manufacturing. Management was widely accused of having "overpromised and underdelivered," creating a chasm between public pronouncements and factory-floor reality.²⁴

Founder Peter Carlsson, drawing on his experience at Tesla, reportedly attempted to emulate Elon Musk's famously bold production style. However, this emulation appeared to be more focused on perception than substance. According to insiders, his approach was characterized by "concealment rather than resolution." In one telling incident before an inspection by BMW's team, tents were hastily erected inside the factory to create the impression of round-the-clock work. As soon as the BMW delegation departed, the tents were taken down.²² This episode highlights a dangerous misinterpretation of the "Tesla model." Northvolt's leadership appeared to adopt the aesthetics of a high-pressure, ambitious culture without understanding the deep, underlying engineering discipline and relentless problem-solving required to make it work. They emulated the hype, not the execution, a fatal error in a capital-intensive industry.

Operational Chaos: Flawed Design, Defective Products, and Supplier Clashes

Northvolt's production floor was a scene of systemic chaos. The most critical issue was a fundamentally flawed battery design; according to engineers, the company's process parameters were "flawed from the very beginning".²² In a display of its institutional hubris, Northvolt's management insisted on unrealistic and technically impossible manufacturing specifications. For example, they demanded a precision parameter of 0.1 millimeters for a slitting process that was physically limited to 0.5 mm, leading to an "overwhelming volume of defective batteries".²²

The defect rate was catastrophic. Reports indicated that 50% of all manufactured batteries were faulty, forcing the company to build an adjacent recycling center just to handle the waste.²⁵ One engineer claimed that at certain points, 80% of the batteries produced were scrap, yet the company "kept manufacturing anyway," refusing to revise its flawed requirements.²²

This internal dysfunction was exacerbated by a heavy reliance on and constant conflict with Chinese suppliers, who provided critical machinery and expertise.¹⁸ Severe cultural clashes emerged over work schedules; Chinese teams were prepared to work overtime to meet deadlines, while Northvolt staff adhered to a standard European workday, causing massive project delays.²² Communication breakdowns were rampant, as experienced Chinese engineers struggled with English and Northvolt's multinational team, often unfamiliar with the basics of battery production, misunderstood technical translations.²² The company's hiring strategy, which favored PhDs for roles typically filled by vocational graduates in China, further highlighted a profound workforce inefficiency.²² This was reflected in maintenance times, where local personnel took days to fix problems that Chinese teams could resolve in hours.²⁵ The chaos extended to logistics, with precision parts airlifted from China frequently going missing on-site, with losses of up to 50% per shipment.²² Ultimately, Northvolt's collapse was not a failure of ambition, but a failure of the most basic operational competence.

Case Study – Lilium: When Academic Dreams Meet Aeronautic Realities

Lilium's journey from a celebrated academic spin-out to a company filing for insolvency twice is a stark illustration of what happens when technical brilliance is untethered from commercial and operational reality. The company's failure highlights how a team of visionary but inexperienced founders can pursue a technologically complex and questionable design, fueled by hype and massive funding, without a viable path to certification and commercialization.

The Founders: Visionary Engineers, Inexperienced Entrepreneurs

Lilium was born in an academic setting, founded in 2015 by four engineers and PhD students from the prestigious Technical University of Munich.²⁶ CEO Daniel Wiegand, a specialist in flight propulsion systems, conceived of the project while he was still a student.²⁸ Their collective background was in advanced aerospace engineering and passion projects, not in the grueling, highly regulated world of large-scale aircraft manufacturing, certification, and airline operations.²⁸

This gap between academic theory and industrial practice was a critical vulnerability. One of the founders, Patrick Nathen, candidly admitted that the primary challenge was not building an aircraft, but "building a company that can build an aircraft. And an airline. And airports. All at the same time".²⁸ This acknowledgment underscores the immense operational and commercial complexity that the young team faced, a challenge for which their academic backgrounds had not prepared them.

This dynamic exemplifies an "oversized student project" syndrome often seen in deeptech. The founders' inability to accept early, expert criticism of their core concept locked them into a technically and commercially unviable path. When they presented their idea to professors at their own university, the academics expressed skepticism, which the founders reportedly "didn't take very well".³² This rejection of critical feedback suggests an emotional attachment to their initial concept, a common pitfall for first-time founders. Their academic brilliance, in this context, became a liability, creating a confirmation bias that prevented them from pivoting away from a flawed design. The entire €1.5 billion enterprise was therefore built on a foundation that was questioned from the outset by knowledgeable, independent parties, dooming the project from its inception.

Technical and Strategic Missteps

The company's core technology, the Lilium Jet, was centered on a novel and controversial design featuring more than 30 small, electric ducted fans integrated into the wings.²⁹ From an engineering standpoint, this approach was fraught with challenges. Critics within the aerospace community quickly labeled the design as "fatally flawed" and aerodynamically "lossy" due to efficiency issues inherent in small ducted propellers.³² Moreover, the sheer complexity of creating a flight control system to safely and reliably manage three dozen independent engines was described as a "hard nut to crack".³²

Despite these fundamental technical questions, Lilium pursued wildly optimistic development and certification timelines. The company made bold promises of achieving hundreds of kilometers of range, a claim dismissed by some experts as "hot air," who argued that the physics of the design made it feasible only for short, helicopter-like urban commutes.³² Compounding the issue, they set aggressive certification goals at a time when no established regulatory standard even existed for their novel class of aircraft, a clear sign of their underestimation of the industry's complexities.³²

Financial Mismanagement and Collapse

Fueled by hype, Lilium burned through approximately €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) in investor capital.³³ Critics pointed to a pattern of excessive spending for a pre-revenue startup, including the purchase of the former Dornier executive offices at a research airport and handsome executive pay packages.³⁵

The company's financial situation became precarious, leading to its first insolvency filing in October 2024 after it failed to secure a crucial loan guarantee from the German government.³³ A last-minute rescue deal was announced in December 2024 by an investor consortium, but the promised €200 million in new funding never materialized. This collapse of the rescue package plunged the company into a second, and seemingly final, insolvency in February 2025.³³ The turmoil was so severe that during the interim period, staff went unpaid for weeks, with some employees resorting to launching a GoFundMe campaign to cover their basic living expenses.³⁶

A Constellation of Collapses: Common Threads in Deeptech Failures

The stories of Northvolt and Lilium are not isolated incidents. They are part of a broader pattern of high-profile deeptech failures across Europe, each revealing a similar disconnect between ambition and execution. The following comparative analysis and case studies of Arrival, Infarm, Prophesee, and Blickfeld demonstrate recurring themes of flawed strategies, operational ineptitude, and inexperienced leadership, often masked by the official narrative of funding shortfalls or adverse market conditions.

Arrival: The Unproven Strategy and SPAC-Fueled Hype

Arrival, an electric vehicle startup, provides a powerful example of how "easy money" can accelerate mismanagement. Founded by Denis Sverdlov, a former Russian government official with a background in IT, the company's entire strategy was built on an unproven "microfactory" concept featuring fully robotized production.³⁹ This approach was widely seen as overly ambitious and led to significant delays and a complete failure to scale manufacturing.³⁹

The rise of Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) in the early 2020s acted as a firehose of capital for companies like Arrival, allowing them to bypass the more rigorous due diligence of traditional late-stage VC or IPO processes. Arrival went public via a SPAC at a staggering $13 billion valuation but consistently missed its production targets.³⁹ The influx of capital from the SPAC merger enabled and amplified the company's worst strategic impulses, allowing it to pursue its flawed strategy at a massive scale. This led to huge losses—$310 million in a single quarter—and ultimately, a SPAC fraud lawsuit from investors who alleged the company's vision was built on "knowingly incorrect assumptions" and that its vaunted AI robots "never worked".³⁹ The SPAC did not cause the mismanagement, but it supercharged it, turning a potential early-stage failure into a multi-billion-dollar public market implosion.

Infarm: The Scaling Fallacy and Unsustainable Unit Economics

Vertical farming company Infarm illustrates the danger of a flawed business model, regardless of the funding raised. Founded by individuals with backgrounds in the film industry and a passion for self-sufficiency, Infarm secured nearly $500 million to revolutionize urban agriculture.⁴⁴ However, the company's unit economics were fundamentally unsustainable. It burned through cash at an alarming rate; in 2021, Infarm posted a net loss of €127.8 million on just €8 million in revenue.⁶

Plagued by operational inefficiencies and an inability to compete on price with traditional agriculture, the company's ambitious expansion proved to be a costly mistake.⁶ In late 2022, facing soaring energy costs and supply chain disruptions, Infarm announced it was laying off half its workforce.⁴⁴ Over the next year, it exited the majority of its European markets before its various national entities were declared bankrupt, leaving a trail of failed promises and shuttered facilities.⁶

Prophesee: The Pivot Trap and a Lack of Strategic Focus

French deeptech Prophesee demonstrates that even with compelling, cutting-edge technology, a lack of strategic focus can be fatal. The company raised €126 million for its innovative neuromorphic vision systems, which mimic the human eye and brain.³ Despite its technical prowess and partnerships with industry giants, the company filed for insolvency and entered judicial recovery in late 2024, citing a delay in fundraising.⁵⁰

However, industry observers pointed to a more fundamental problem: a critical lack of a clear, consistent strategy. One commentator noted that the company had wasted its capital by "jumping from automotive to industrial automation, from mobile phones to AR/VR".⁵⁰ Another described its approach as "changing market direction every full moon".⁵⁰ This constant pivoting prevented Prophesee from establishing a defensible market position in any single vertical. While its technology was applicable to many fields—from industrial automation to mobile devices and medical applications—this breadth became a curse, straining resources and confusing the market.⁵⁹ The company was trapped in a cycle of exploring potential applications without committing to one long enough to achieve commercial viability.

Blickfeld & Others: The Perilously Long Road to Revenue

The case of Blickfeld, a German LiDAR company, highlights that even with experienced founders and strong technology, a mismatch between the business model and market realities can be fatal in Europe's less patient funding environment. The company raised €68 million, including a significant €15 million loan from the European Investment Bank, to develop its smart LiDAR solutions.³ The founding team comprised experienced entrepreneurs and experts in sensor technology and robotics.⁵³

Despite this strong foundation, Blickfeld filed for insolvency in June 2024.³ The stated reason was that revenue "came in too slowly to meet the demands of patient capital".³ The failure was attributed to a combination of fierce competition in the crowded LiDAR market and a slower-than-expected adoption of autonomous vehicle technology globally.⁵² Blickfeld's collapse underscores a critical challenge for European deeptech: the road from a validated proof-of-concept to sustainable revenue can be exceptionally long, and the regional ecosystem may lack the deep-pocketed, patient capital required to survive that journey.

The Founder's Dilemma: Technical Genius vs. Managerial Acumen

A recurring theme across these failures is a fundamental mismatch between the founders' skills and the immense challenge of building a scalable, industrial-grade company. The case studies reveal distinct founder archetypes, each with strengths that, when unchecked, become critical liabilities.

The Academic Visionary (Lilium)

This archetype, exemplified by Daniel Wiegand and the Lilium team, possesses deep technical knowledge and a compelling, world-changing vision born from academic research.²⁷ Their strength lies in theoretical design and innovation. However, this is often coupled with a lack of commercial experience, operational discipline, and an appreciation for the non-technical complexities of regulation, manufacturing, and supply chain management. As seen with Lilium, their deep conviction in their own technical solution can lead them to ignore practical feedback and underestimate the brutal challenges of execution, turning their primary strength into a fatal weakness.³²

The Industry Outsider (Arrival & Infarm)

This archetype includes founders who enter a traditional, physically constrained industry from an unrelated field, such as Denis Sverdlov of Arrival (IT and government) and the founders of Infarm (film and lifestyle).⁴¹ They often bring a fresh, disruptive perspective but can fundamentally misunderstand the physics and economics of the industry they are trying to change. Sverdlov's attempt to apply a software-like "microfactory" model to the capital-intensive world of automotive manufacturing ignored decades of established industrial logic.³⁹ Similarly, Infarm's founders failed to grasp the brutal unit economics of agriculture, leading to a business model with unsustainable cash burn.⁶ Their lack of domain-specific experience results in business models that are fatally flawed from the outset.

The Corporate Veteran (Northvolt)

This archetype, represented by Northvolt's Peter Carlsson, has experience at a successful, innovative corporation like Tesla but may misapply the lessons learned.¹⁶ The analysis of Northvolt suggests that its leadership replicated the high-stakes, high-pressure culture of Tesla without the foundational, first-principles engineering approach that underpins it. Experience within one unique and successful corporate culture does not automatically translate to the ability to build a new industrial giant from scratch, particularly if that experience fosters hubris and a dismissal of external expertise, as was evident in Northvolt's disastrous interactions with its suppliers.²²

The core issue is not merely inexperience, but a systemic failure within the European ecosystem to effectively pair visionary technical founders with seasoned operational co-founders or C-suite executives at the earliest stages. The "lone genius" founder model, often imported from the world of US software startups, is particularly ill-suited for European deeptech, which is predominantly hardware-focused and requires a deep respect for the complexities of manufacturing, logistics, and the physical world. While the US ecosystem has a history of successful partnerships between visionaries and operators (e.g., Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple), the European cases studied often show the visionary founder remaining in sole control for too long. By the time experienced executives are brought in, as with Klaus Roewe at Lilium, the company is often already on an irreversible path to failure.²⁹ The ecosystem celebrates the technical visionary but fails to provide the crucial operational counterpart needed to translate that vision into a viable industrial enterprise.

Analysis and Recommendations: Forging a More Resilient European Deeptech Ecosystem

The pattern of mismanagement detailed in these case studies is not an indictment of European ambition but a call for a fundamental shift in approach. To move from post-mortem to a forward-looking strategy, all stakeholders—founders, investors, and policymakers—must internalize these lessons and commit to building a more resilient deeptech ecosystem. The following recommendations are designed to mitigate these recurring patterns of failure.

For Founders: Embrace Operational Excellence from Day One

The failures of Northvolt, Arrival, and Lilium were, at their core, operational failures. Technical brilliance and a compelling vision are necessary but insufficient for success in deeptech. Founders must recognize the limits of their own expertise and build teams that compensate for their weaknesses.

Recommendation: Prioritize hiring an experienced Chief Operating Officer (COO) or a co-founder with a deep, proven background in manufacturing, supply chain logistics, and large-scale project management. This hire should be made before the Series A funding round, not as a last-ditch effort to save a failing enterprise. Technical founders must be willing to cede operational control to those with proven execution capabilities.

For Investors: Beyond the Pitch Deck – A Mandate for Deeper Diligence and Active Governance

The European VC community must evolve beyond its traditional focus. The knowledge gap that leads to underinvestment also leads to poor investment decisions, where flawed plans are funded at massive valuations based on hype rather than substance.³

Recommendation: Venture capital firms investing in deeptech must develop or acquire in-house technical and operational expertise. This is essential for conducting rigorous due diligence that goes beyond the core technology to scrutinize manufacturing plans, unit economics, supply chain strategies, and the operational experience of the founding team. Post-investment, investors must take a more active governance role, using their board seats to enforce operational milestones and, if necessary, mandate changes in management when execution falters.

For Policymakers: Cultivating an Ecosystem, Not Just Picking Winners

Public funds play a crucial role in deeptech, but the Northvolt case demonstrates that massive state backing cannot save a poorly managed company.¹⁸ Government strategy should shift from making high-risk bets on single "domestic champions" to creating the underlying conditions for the entire ecosystem to thrive.

Recommendation: Policymakers should focus on systemic improvements. This includes reforming bankruptcy laws to reduce the stigma of failure and allow entrepreneurs to learn and try again.⁹ It requires creating stronger incentives for talent retention to combat the brain drain. Finally, public funding should support the creation of cross-border "centers of excellence" that cluster talent, capital, and operational expertise, fostering the kind of dense, collaborative environment that has proven successful elsewhere.¹ A pragmatic "location over ownership" approach, which encourages high-tech manufacturing within Europe regardless of the company's national origin, could prove more effective at building a resilient industrial base than protectionist champion-building.¹⁸

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