Between 2010 and 2025, the number of acquisitions of companies backed by venture capital funds in Europe increased 18-fold, from 62 to 1,090 transactions over 15 years, according to data compiled by Dealroom. The acceleration has continued since 2020, the year of the Covid-19 pandemic, with acquisitions carried out by European startups jumping 250% over the past six years.

But even more interestingly, the average deal value has declined over time, falling from €66 million in 2010 to around €18 million in 2025, illustrating the democratization of smaller transactions worth less than €10 million. As the startup ecosystem has become much more mature across the Old Continent over the past decade, tech startups have increasingly found themselves in a position to become acquirers and consolidate their respective sectors.

It has to be said that their numbers have increased considerably: there are now 40,000 companies backed by venture capital funds in Europe, compared with 13,000 ten years ago. And to grow, an increasing number of them are turning to inorganic growth to strengthen their position by acquiring complementary companies. This trend prompted investment firm XAnge to conduct an in-depth analysis to better understand it. “At XAnge, we have had 40 buy-side transactions in five years, which is a lot,” says Nicolas Rose, Managing Partner of the pan-European fund, which has offices in Paris, Berlin and Brussels.

The result of this analysis is a European M&A playbook. Titled “Buy to Grow: The M&A Playbook for European Founders”, it takes the form of a 100-page operational guide aimed at founders of European tech scale-ups looking to grow through acquisitions. The playbook covers the entire acquisition cycle: M&A strategy, target identification, financing, negotiation, integration and value creation. The goal is to help acquirers choose the right target and successfully integrate it. The latter represents a major challenge, as XAnge notes that nearly 70% of acquisitions fail to generate the expected value.

In Nicolas Rose’s view, the acquisition process is not so different from that of a traditional fundraising round, the preferred growth accelerator for startups over the past decade. “It’s a more sophisticated fundraising round, because there are more stakeholders involved in the transaction, such as bankers, M&A teams and so on. But it is a growth project that must first begin with board alignment. And bringing in an external resource to handle M&A is a key success factor. It can be decisive in organizing the financing and closing the deal,” explains the Managing Partner of XAnge, which launched a new investment vehicle in November 2025 with a first closing at €200 million.

Unsurprisingly, the best-funded startups have the greatest freedom to pursue inorganic growth. “M&A is correlated with the startup’s funding position. The faster you are growing, the more quickly you can access financing, and therefore the more likely the CEO is to pursue M&A,” says Nicolas Rose. “It’s not the age of the company that matters most, it’s the speed. Look at Mistral: the company was founded in 2023 and has been using M&A as a growth lever for the past year,” he adds.

Indeed, Arthur Mensch’s company raised €1.7 billion in September 2025, giving it the means to make its first acquisitions, with Koyeb earlier this year and Emmi AI in May. Since then, Mistral has closed a new €3 billion funding round a few weeks ago and completed another acquisition with Pimento. And this buying spree is likely only just beginning.

Like Mistral, the AI sector is experiencing a boom in acquisitions. Transactions in the sector accounted for nearly 14% of all acquisitions in Europe in 2025, up 50% over two years. “It’s the third-largest sector in terms of the number of acquisitions, but it is accelerating rapidly,” confirms Nicolas Rose.

Since 2010, the SaaS sector (2,022 acquisitions) and fintech (1,416 acquisitions) have recorded the most transactions. AI, for its part, has seen 1,042 acquisitions over 15 years. “SaaS was yesterday, AI is what’s happening now,” Nicolas Rose says with a smile. Against this backdrop, XAnge hopes to provide entrepreneurs across the Old Continent with an M&A compass through its newly unveiled playbook.