An industry association counts venture capital from its members

The record

Invest Europe, the industry association for European private equity and venture capital, reports activity gathered directly from its members rather than from deal-by-deal database tracking. Its Investing in Europe: Private Equity activity 2024 report, published 8 May 2025, is built from what the association's Private Equity & Venture Capital Research page describes as data on "more than 1,750 firms." Invest Europe's related press release, also dated 8 May 2025, states that European venture capital investment reached €18 billion in 2024, up 26% on 2023 and "the second highest level ever registered in Europe," with venture fundraising at €22 billion, up 43%, and divestment at €3 billion, up 12%.

What the sources establish

The research page establishes that these figures come from a standing collection vehicle, the European Data Cooperative, run jointly by Invest Europe and national partners across fundraising, investment, divestment and other economic-impact measures fund managers self-report. That differs from a commercial database's approach: Invest Europe compiles numbers members submit about their own funds, checked against a stated glossary and methodology for inclusion and exclusion, rather than identifying and verifying individual rounds the way Dealroom or PitchBook do. The press release explicitly separates venture capital from buyout activity within the same report, citing buyout investment of €87 billion against venture's €18 billion, so the two must not be added into a single "private capital" figure without saying which part is venture.

Scope and revision

The €18 billion figure covers investment activity reported by Invest Europe's member base as venture capital specifically, in euros, for calendar year 2024, published in May of the following year, a materially slower cadence than the quarterly Crunchbase or CB Insights series. Coverage depends on which firms are members and choose to report in a given cycle, which the association's own transparency statement acknowledges via its inclusion and exclusion criteria; a fund outside the collection would not appear here even if a commercial database had already recorded its deals. The report's own framing, that 2024 investment sat "some 66% above the total achieved in 2019," is Invest Europe's comparison on its own series and should not be spliced onto a different provider's years.

The decision in front of you

An analyst citing European venture capital totals should say which of the region's providers supplied the number, since a member-reported association figure, a manually verified Dealroom figure and a database-extrapolated PitchBook-style figure for the same year will not match. Naming Invest Europe specifically, rather than "European data," is the more honest citation.

• Is this figure venture capital alone, or does it blend in buyout and growth investment?
• Does the source count only investment by Invest Europe's member funds, or the whole regional market?
• How many months after year-end was this figure published, relative to a database provider's equivalent report?

A trade association's member survey and a commercial deal database are both legitimate primary sources; they answer different questions about the same market, and only one of them is answering what its own members did.