European universities connect top tech talents

(CONNECT) Some of Europe's preeminent university centers for deep tech innovation are offering their best tech talent the newly created Relativity Collective. The program of this name is intended to bring together outstanding entrepreneurial talents across borders and open up new, more ambitious horizons for them. "With the right environment, the best will be able to skip the start-up phase and directly build a European scale-up with global impact," said Alexander Ilic, co-founder of the participating ETH AI Center at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), in a press release.

According to the report, the Relativity Collective start-up program is being set up against the backdrop that while Europe produces exceptional talent, networks for young entrepreneurs are largely local. "As a result, many of the peer relationships that most influence ambition, speed and scale are formed too late - after the founders' reference points and trajectories are already established." Accordingly, the program is designed as a targeted intervention in this early phase.

The first group of up to 25 future founders brings together students and doctoral students from six universities. In addition to ETH, these are the Finnish Aalto University in Espoo, the Center for Digital Technology and Management, a joint research and teaching institute of the Technical University of Munich and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden's largest technical university in Stockholm and EnSpire Oxford, the Entrepreneurship Institute of the University of Oxford.

This group will meet in March 2026 for a three-day face-to-face program. The entire programme is organized by Rise Europe, an alliance dedicated to strengthening European start-up ecosystems. The initiative reflects a shared belief that building the next global technology giant in Europe requires more than just capital and infrastructure. ce/mm