# Germany Approves a 152 Point Plan to Stop Its Best Startups Leaving Home > The cabinet has signed off a startup strategy aimed at a single stubborn problem, that the country is good at founding companies but poor at keeping them here once they grow. - Source: Berlin Today - Canonical URL: https://berlintoday.eu/article/germany-approves-a-152-point-plan-to-stop-its-best-startups-leaving-home - Author: Doug Brown - Section: Economy - Published: 2026-07-22T13:13:19.119Z - Updated: 2026-07-22T13:13:19.119Z - Tags: startups, Germany, venture capital, Future Fund, economy, innovation --- Germany has never struggled to start companies. Keeping them is the harder trick. On Tuesday the cabinet approved a startup strategy built around that gap, a 36 page document from the economy ministry that sets out 152 separate measures meant to help young firms scale up without abandoning the country that produced them. The ambition behind the paper is easy to state and hard to deliver. Ministers want more of Germany's promising companies to reach real size at home, rather than raising their later money abroad and drifting towards New York or London as they mature. The plan is essentially a list of the frictions that push founders overseas, paired with promises to file each one down. ## Money, people and paperwork Three obstacles run through the strategy. The first is finance, since German startups still raise far less than their American or British rivals, with venture capital investment reaching 7.2 billion euros in 2025, a figure that looks modest beside the sums available across the Atlantic. The second is talent, with the government promising to make it easier to attract skilled workers. The third is bureaucracy, the thicket of rules that greets anyone trying to found a company and that the plan aims to thin out. Behind those headings sits a clear bet on where growth will come from. The strategy singles out technology, biotechnology and defence as sectors where private capital needs to be drawn in, an unusually direct statement of national priorities for a document that might otherwise read as general encouragement. It is a signal about which industries Berlin believes will define the next decade. ## A founding boom that has not yet become a scaling boom The numbers give the plan its urgency and its optimism at once. Germany saw a record 3,053 startups founded in the first half of 2026, a jump of 52 percent on the second half of 2025, evidence that the appetite to build is stronger than it has been in years. Startups employed 522,000 people in 2024, a quarter more than four years earlier, so the sector is already a serious source of jobs rather than a niche. The trouble is what happens next. Germany has repeatedly shown it can produce successful young companies and then failed to turn them into lasting growth firms, watching momentum stall at the point where a promising business should become a large one. Founding records mean little if the companies behind them cannot make the leap to scale, and closing that second gap is the real test of the whole exercise. ## The Future Fund stays in play One concrete commitment stands out from the list. The Future Fund, the government backed venture capital programme launched in 2021 to channel money into young companies, will be extended beyond 2030. Prolonging a proven vehicle rather than inventing a new one suggests the government wants continuity where founders most need it, in the availability of patient late stage capital. Whether 152 measures add up to a genuine change of trajectory will only become clear over years, not months. A strategy can remove obstacles on paper, but the decision to stay and grow in Germany is one that thousands of founders make individually, weighing money, talent and red tape against the pull of larger markets abroad. The cabinet has now set out its answer to that calculation, and the next founding cohort will show whether it was persuasive. --- Originally published by Berlin Today. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://berlintoday.eu/article/germany-approves-a-152-point-plan-to-stop-its-best-startups-leaving-home.