Across Europe, a new wave of scale-ups is quietly building the next generation of unicorns. Away from the hype cycles and flashy announcements, a handful of teams are reshaping how we pay, decarbonise industries and deliver digital services at scale. They are still under the $1 billion valuation radar today, but they tick most of the boxes that typically precede a unicorn: fast growth, clear business model, regulatory moat, international traction and strong backing from top-tier investors.
In fintech, climate tech and digital services, five European companies stand out as realistic candidates for tomorrow’s unicorn club. Beyond the label, they are interesting for another reason: they show where real value is being created in the European tech ecosystem – and what that means for banks, utilities, industrials and service businesses.
Why these five and not others?
Europe counts dozens of promising scale-ups. To narrow down the field, three pragmatic criteria were used:
- Clear problem–solution fit: they address a structural pain point (compliance, decarbonisation, automation) rather than a short-lived consumer trend.
- B2B or infrastructure angle: they enable other companies to move faster, comply better or reduce costs – which tends to generate stickier revenue.
- Evidence of scale: significant funding raised, strong growth signals (customers, markets, partnerships), and a credible path to profitability.
On this basis, five names emerge in fintech, climate tech and digital services as serious “future unicorn” candidates:
- Swan (France) – embedded finance infrastructure
- Volt (United Kingdom) – real-time account-to-account payments
- H2 Green Steel (Sweden) – low-carbon steel at industrial scale
- Sweep (France) – enterprise carbon management platform
- Pennylane (France) – digital finance & accounting operating system for SMEs
Let’s look at what each of them is building, and why large organisations should pay attention now – not when these companies are already too big to ignore.
Swan – turning any business into a fintech, quietly
Every bank says it wants to “become a tech company”. Swan took the opposite route: it helps tech and non-financial companies offer banking services without becoming a bank.
Based in Paris and regulated as an electronic money institution, Swan provides an API platform that lets businesses embed bank accounts, IBANs, cards and payments into their product in a matter of weeks. Instead of spending 18–24 months obtaining licences, integrating with legacy core banking systems and building compliance teams, a company can piggyback on Swan’s regulated infrastructure.
Key facts and signals:
- Business model: B2B “banking-as-a-service” (BaaS), with revenue from usage-based fees and interchange.
- Target clients: SaaS platforms, marketplaces, HR and expense tools, B2B vertical software players across Europe.
- Moat: regulatory expertise and compliance stack, plus deep integrations with card schemes and payment rails.
This type of infrastructure is not new; several BaaS players emerged in the last decade. What makes Swan interesting now is the second wave of embedded finance. Instead of launching standalone neobanks, tech companies are quietly integrating financial features to increase stickiness and monetisation:
- HR platforms offering salary advance or expense cards
- Construction SaaS managing supplier payments and escrow
- Marketplaces handling instant payouts and multi-party settlements
For incumbents – especially mid-sized banks – this raises a strategic question: do you still own the customer relationship when your services are consumed entirely through third-party interfaces? Players like Swan accelerate this shift by making it trivial for software platforms to “switch on” financial features.
Implication for decision-makers: if your business touches payments, wallets, cards or accounts, you have two options – compete head-on with embedded finance, or integrate it into your product before your competitors do.
Volt – betting on real-time, account-to-account payments
Card payments and direct debits still dominate in Europe, but the regulatory groundwork for a different paradigm has been laid over the past years. With PSD2 and open banking APIs, merchants can increasingly initiate payments directly from a customer’s bank account, bypassing card networks.
Volt, headquartered in London, sits exactly on this fault line. The company provides an orchestration layer for real-time account-to-account (A2A) payments across European and global markets. The idea is simple: instead of integrating separately with dozens of banks and domestic instant payment schemes, merchants can plug into Volt’s API and access a unified network.
Practical benefits are far from theoretical:
- Lower fees: no card scheme costs, which matters at scale for e-commerce, travel and marketplaces.
- Faster settlement: instant or near-instant funds, improving cash management.
- Reduced fraud risk: strong customer authentication via the bank’s own interfaces.
From a business standpoint, Volt positions itself as payment infrastructure for high-volume merchants, PSPs (payment service providers) and platforms that want to add an A2A option next to cards and wallets.
Why this looks like a future unicorn trajectory:
- The addressable market – card payments displacement – is measured in hundreds of billions of euros of volume annually.
- Regulators in the EU push for wider adoption of instant payments and competition with incumbent card schemes.
- Merchants are under pressure to optimise payment costs and reduce chargebacks.
Yet the path is not trivial: regulations, bank API quality, and consumer habits differ from one country to another. Volt’s value lies precisely in absorbing this complexity so that merchants don’t have to.
For retailers, platforms and even banks, the question is no longer “if” A2A payments will matter, but “when” and “in which use cases”. Having a strategy for instant A2A – either directly or through partners like Volt – is fast becoming a competitive requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
H2 Green Steel – decarbonising a core industry, not just offsets
Many “climate tech” startups focus on measurement, reporting or incremental efficiency. H2 Green Steel, based in Sweden, went for something much more ambitious: build a new, large-scale steel plant that uses green hydrogen instead of coal.
Why steel? Because it accounts for roughly 7–8% of global CO₂ emissions. If you are serious about decarbonisation, you cannot ignore steel – nor cement, chemicals and shipping. H2 Green Steel aims to produce steel with up to 95% fewer CO₂ emissions compared with conventional blast furnace routes, using renewable electricity to create green hydrogen that reduces iron ore.
What makes H2 Green Steel look like a future industrial unicorn:
- Massive market: steel is a basic input for construction, automotive, machinery and infrastructure.
- Regulatory tailwind: EU Green Deal, carbon pricing, and stricter emission standards create strong incentives to switch to low-carbon materials.
- Customer pull: carmakers and large industrials have committed to science-based targets and need cleaner steel to hit their scope 3 goals.
The company has secured significant funding commitments, long-term offtake agreements with major industrial customers, and support from both private and public finance. This is not a classic software scale-up story; it’s a capital-intensive industrial venture. But the underlying logic is similar:
- Build a differentiated product (low-carbon steel) answering a regulatory and market need.
- Secure demand early through binding contracts.
- Leverage scale to drive down costs and expand to new sites and regions.
For corporate decision-makers, especially in automotive, construction and heavy industry, the message is clear: access to low-carbon materials is becoming a strategic resource. Early partnerships – whether through offtake agreements, joint ventures or R&D collaborations – will matter, and they will not be available indefinitely at “pilot project” prices.
Sweep – making carbon data usable, not just reportable
If H2 Green Steel tackles physical emissions at the factory level, Sweep operates at a different layer: helping organisations measure, manage and reduce their carbon footprint across complex value chains.
Headquartered in France, Sweep builds a platform that ingests emissions data from multiple sources (suppliers, business units, financial systems), normalises it, and provides dashboards and collaboration tools to manage decarbonisation plans. The company positions itself not just as a carbon accounting tool, but as a “carbon management system” that mirrors the way financial ERPs structure data and workflows.
Why this matters now:
- Regulation is escalating: the EU’s CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) expands non-financial reporting requirements to around 50,000 companies. Many will have to report scope 3 emissions for the first time.
- Data complexity explodes: emissions are tied to procurement, logistics, energy contracts, investments and more – rarely concentrated in one system.
- Investors and clients demand plans, not just reports: simply publishing a carbon footprint is no longer enough; companies must show how they intend to reduce it over time.
Sweep’s differentiation lies in its attempt to connect high-level CO₂ targets with operational levers: actions, budgets, owners, and progress tracking. Think of it as turning what used to be an annual PDF exercise into a continuous management process.
From a business perspective, that opens several paths:
- “Land and expand” within large corporates, starting with a pilot scope and then rolling out group-wide.
- Vertical solutions for sectors with specific reporting frameworks (financial services, retail, manufacturing).
- Partner ecosystems with consultants, auditors and integrators who embed Sweep into broader transformation projects.
For companies exposed to CSRD or similar frameworks, the question is no longer whether to invest in carbon management tooling, but which architecture to adopt. Spreadsheets, generic BI tools and ad-hoc consultants might work for the first report. They rarely scale to group-level governance across dozens of entities and thousands of suppliers. Platforms like Sweep signal the emergence of a “carbon stack” that will sit next to your financial and risk systems.
Pennylane – turning SME accounting into a real-time cockpit
While large corporates deploy ERPs and dedicated finance teams, most European SMEs still juggle between outdated accounting software, PDF invoices and email exchanges with their accountants. The result: financial visibility arrives weeks or months too late to support decisions.
Pennylane, based in Paris, addresses this structural inefficiency with a full-stack finance and accounting platform for SMEs and their accountants. Rather than building a tool only for business owners or only for accountants, Pennylane designed a shared workspace that connects invoicing, payments, bookkeeping and document management.
Key elements of the model:
- Unified platform: SMEs can issue invoices, pay suppliers and track cashflow, while accountants access the same data in real time for bookkeeping and tax filings.
- Automation: integrating bank feeds and OCR to reduce manual data entry.
- Distribution strategy: working with accounting firms as both users and channels, rather than disintermediating them.
The strategic bet is straightforward: if you control the financial cockpit for SMEs, you are in a strong position to add adjacent services over time – from financing and insurance to payroll or expense management. In other words, the SME “OS” for finance is a gateway to a broader suite of digital services.
From a macro perspective, this is also about productivity. In many European economies, SMEs account for over 90% of businesses and a large share of employment, yet their digitalisation level is far behind that of large companies. Automating low-value finance tasks frees up time and reduces errors, which translates into better cash management and resilience.
For banks, insurance groups and large platforms targeting SMEs, the rise of players like Pennylane raises a familiar question: who owns the daily relationship? If SMEs spend hours each week in a single finance interface, that interface becomes the natural place to distribute credit, guarantees, savings or analytics. Large incumbents can either integrate with such platforms or attempt to build equivalent experiences – but the window of opportunity is narrowing.
What these future unicorns say about Europe’s next tech cycle
Across Swan, Volt, H2 Green Steel, Sweep and Pennylane, common patterns emerge that go beyond sector specifics. They point to structural shifts in how value is created in Europe’s tech ecosystem.
- Infrastructure over apps: these companies are not chasing the next social trend; they are building rails – financial, industrial, environmental or operational – that other businesses run on.
- Regulation as a catalyst, not a constraint: open banking rules, climate disclosure frameworks and industrial decarbonisation policies are complex, but they also create defensible markets for those who can navigate them.
- Deep integration with incumbents: far from the old “disrupt or die” narratives, many of these scale-ups grow through partnerships with banks, utilities, manufacturers, accounting firms and consultants.
In other words, the next generation of European unicorns is likely to be less about consumer-facing “super-apps” and more about backbone systems that quietly reshape how key sectors operate.
How corporates and policymakers can act today
For large organisations, waiting until these players officially cross the unicorn threshold is often waiting too long. The competitive and learning advantages tend to accrue to those who engage early. Concretely, three avenues stand out:
- Strategic pilots: test embedded finance with a Swan-style partner, integrate A2A payments via a player like Volt, or run a limited-scope carbon management deployment with a platform akin to Sweep.
- Procurement as a lever of innovation: instead of treating these startups purely as “vendors”, structure procurement processes that allow co-design, shared KPIs and staged rollouts.
- Policy alignment: regulators and public agencies can accelerate adoption by clarifying rules (for open finance, green industrial projects, reporting standards) and by supporting pilot projects in strategic sectors.
For SMEs and mid-market companies, the message is equally direct: the tools that used to be reserved for large groups – real-time payments, industrial-grade decarbonisation strategies, integrated finance – are being packaged as services and made accessible through APIs and SaaS platforms. The question is less “if” you will adopt them than “whether you’ll still be competitive if you don’t”.
Europe’s next unicorns are not just a funding story or a vanity metric. They are a preview of the operating models – financial, industrial and digital – that will define the competitiveness of European businesses over the next decade. Watching them from afar is interesting. Working with them early is, increasingly, a strategic necessity.