Drumbeat Capital is an early-stage deep tech investor built around a deliberately transatlantic structure. Founding partner Lukas Leitner, based in Munich, shares the firm’s thesis that European and American ecosystems each hold resources the other is missing — for early-stage founders, a genuine edge rather than a nice-to-have.
During the first day of the TechBBQ in Copenhagen, NXTin.health spoke with Lukas Leitner about where he sees Europe’s life sciences and biotech landscape standing against the US, why so many European breakthroughs still end up being commercialised across the Atlantic, and where he expects the next wave of health innovation to come from.
You have described Drumbeat Capital’s transatlantic setup. Turning to the European landscape specifically, what is your read on innovation across health tech, biotech and life sciences more broadly? What is Europe missing to compete with a market like the US?
The research base is genuinely strong. Look at where a lot of this innovation is actually happening: Denmark, for instance, where we’re speaking today, is a good example. We’ve seen data suggesting biotech and life sciences account for somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent of all venture activity in the country. Add the pharma strength in Switzerland and Germany, and you have a huge amount of innovation coming directly out of European research labs.
What’s missing is, first, a mindset shift among researchers themselves — encouraging them to see a business in what they’ve discovered, rather than stopping at the scientific breakthrough. That’s the starting point: giving researchers the confidence and support to commercialise their own work.
Second, and just as pressing, is the shortage of late-stage growth capital. Turning a breakthrough into a company takes serious capital. Early-stage funding in Europe is reasonably healthy — in deep tech overall, the US is only around two to three times ahead of Europe at that stage. But at growth stage, that gap widens to ten or fifteen times. That’s the capital that’s actually needed to build biotech and life sciences companies at scale in Europe.
We hear this pattern often in our interviews with innovators in this space: European researchers secure funding here, develop the product here, and then commercialise in the US. Are we at risk of becoming the place that fuels the innovation while America captures the value?
That’s a real problem, because it means the actual value creation happens elsewhere. What we need to fix in Europe is giving entrepreneurs and companies the resources to build great companies without needing to leave. Right now, for a lot of founders, going to the US isn’t really a choice — it’s closer to the only option, because the resources simply aren’t available here.
Access to capital is the core of that, but it also comes down to investors here becoming more comfortable underwriting the risk profile these companies carry. If founders have what they need on this side of the Atlantic, there are plenty of good reasons for them to stay.
Looking ahead, where do you see the next major health innovation coming from in Europe?
Computational biology is where I see the most potential. At a fundamental level, biology is computation in one form or another. Combine large language models and generative AI with the genuinely valuable data sitting inside pharma companies, hospitals, clinical trial networks and universities, and you start being able to pair AI capability with sector- and indication-specific data in a meaningful way.
Once that early-stage bottleneck starts to ease — once AI can genuinely help identify targeted drugs and therapies — the constraint shifts from finding the right hits and targets to running clinical trials more efficiently. That’s a significant opportunity for Europe to take. AlphaFold is a good reminder of what’s possible here: that came out of a Google DeepMind team in London. There’s every reason to believe Europe has the capability to build companies of that calibre.
