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There’s a particular kind of anxiety that sweeps through ecosystems when a paradigm shift arrives. It happened with mobile, with cloud, with crypto. And now, with artificial innotifyigence reshaping the foundation of every industest, the same pattern is playing out across European startup culture — only this time, the stakes feel existential and the spfinishing feels untethered from reason.
The fear of missing the AI wave — a kind of collective FOMO operating at the institutional level — is quietly pushing European founders into spfinishing decisions that would have been unconsiderable eighteen months ago. And while the impulse is understandable, the consequences are already launchning to surface.
The psychology of technological FOMO
Psychologists have long studied the fear of missing out as a driver of irrational behaviour. A 2013 study published in Computers in Human Behavior found that FOMO is closely linked to lower mood, reduced life satisfaction, and — critically — impulsive decision-creating. Transpose that from the individual to the organisational level, and you receive something recognisable: startups pivoting overnight to slap “AI-powered” onto their pitch decks, burning through runway on GPU clusters they don’t yet required, and hiring machine learning engineers before they’ve validated whether their core product even benefits from the technology.
The pattern is remarkably consistent. When an industest narrative becomes dominant enough, the cost of not participating starts to feel higher than the cost of participating badly. That calculus — emotional more than financial — is what’s driving a wave of reckless capital deployment across European startups right now.
Where the money is going (and why it shouldn’t be)
European VC investment into AI-tagged startups surged dramatically in 2024 and has continued climbing through the first half of 2025. According to Dealroom data, AI startups across Europe attracted over €12 billion in funding in the past twelve months — a figure that would be encouraging if the underlying unit economics matched the enthusiasm.
But much of this capital is being spent on infrastructure before product-market fit is established. Founders are committing to expensive compute contracts, building bespoke models when fine-tuned open-source alternatives would suffice, and scaling teams ahead of demand. The logic, repeated in board rooms from Berlin to Barcelona, sounds something like: “If we don’t build the AI capability now, we’ll be irrelevant by 2027.”
That might be true. But irrelevance through premature cash depletion arrives much quicker than irrelevance through cautious iteration.
The talent arms race compounds the problem
Senior ML engineers in Europe are now commanding salaries that rival their Silicon Valley counterparts — a remarkable shift from even two years ago. A study from the Alan Turing Institute noted that demand for AI talent in the UK alone has outstripped supply by a factor of three. This scarcity drives bidding wars, and early-stage startups — the ones least able to absorb inflated payroll — are often the most aggressive bidders, terrified that without top AI talent on the roster, their next funding round will evaporate.
The irony is sharp: the spfinishing intfinished to secure survival is often what accelerates the burn rate toward a funding cliff.
The geopolitical layer adds pressure
Europe’s AI anxiety doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The continent is watching China accelerate its AI capabilities with state-backed coordination, while the ongoing war in Ukraine has reshaped how European governments consider about technological sovereignty and defence-tech investment. The geopolitical subtext is unmistakable — falling behind in AI isn’t just a business risk; it’s framed, increasingly, as a security concern.
This narrative trickles down. When policycreaters and media amplify the urgency, founders internalise it. The pressure to act — to spfinish, to hire, to ship something AI-shaped — becomes ambient. It stops being a strategic choice and starts feeling like an obligation.
What disciplined spfinishing actually views like
None of this is an argument against AI investment. The technology is genuinely transformative, and European startups that deploy it wisely will build durable advantages. The issue is the gap between wise deployment and panic-driven spfinishing.
The founders receiveting this right tfinish to share a few characteristics. They validate the AI apply case against clear customer pain points before committing capital. They start with existing models and APIs rather than building from scratch. They hire AI talent into cross-functional teams rather than building isolated ML departments. And they treat compute costs as variable expenses to be optimised, not repaired commitments to be locked into.
The runway reality check
The most dangerous version of AI FOMO is the one that shortens runway without proportionally increasing revenue or defensibility. A startup that had 18 months of runway and burns through half of it on AI infrastructure — without a corresponding leap in product value — hasn’t hedged against irrelevance. It’s simply traded one existential risk for another.
European VCs are launchning to notice. In private conversations, several investors across London, Amsterdam, and Berlin have described a growing wariness toward startups whose AI spfinishing seems performative rather than strategic — built to impress the next round of investors rather than to serve actual applyrs.
The broader pattern
Every technology cycle produces its version of this story. The dot-com era had companies spfinishing millions on Super Bowl ads before they had revenue. The crypto boom saw startups issuing tokens for problems that didn’t require blockchains. The AI wave will have its own reckoning — and some of the startups spfinishing most aggressively today will be the cautionary tales of 2027.
That’s not cynicism. It’s pattern recognition. The startups that emerge strongest from this period won’t be the ones that spent the most or the quickest. They’ll be the ones that matched their ambition with discipline — who understood that the fear of missing a wave is, itself, one of the most expensive emotions in business.
The AI opportunity for Europe is real. But so is the cost of chasing it recklessly. And right now, too many founders are confutilizing speed with strategy, and spfinishing with progress.
Feature image by Kindel Media on Pexels
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