Gregor Gimmy thinks Europe needs to rethink the Venture Client model before its best startups go elsewhere
When most European executives talk about startups, they still default to two playbooks: invest in them (venture capital) or host them (accelerators, incubators, labs with beanbags).
For Gregor Gimmy, founder of 27pilots (now part of Deloitte) and the person who coined "Venture Clienting" at BMW, that mindset is exactly the problem.
His core point is simple: the disruptive move is not equity, it’s procurement. The real power isn’t in owning startups, but in becoming their customer quickly, systematically and at scale.
"So a Venture Client is a client of a Venture and the venture is a startup it’s that easy so the venture client uses the startup technology in products or in processes," he explains. Venture capitalists provide money; venture clients provide something far more existential for a young company: revenue and real-world use.
Follow us on: 
In other words, the most powerful support an established company can give a startup is not a cheque or a mentoring session. It’s a purchase order.
The US, especially Silicon Valley, has spent decades internalising this logic. Europe, Gimmy argues, has not. And unless the mindset shifts fast, the continent will keep exporting its best technologies to markets where large companies know how to buy from startups.
From buzzword to operating system
Venture clienting is often mistaken for just "doing pilots with startups". Gimmy insists that’s not what he means.
"I coined the term at BMW in 2014 but obviously the activity and the ideas behind the term have existed before... what hadn’t existed was a systematic methodology," he says.
Historically, big companies worked with startups in a random, personality-driven way: someone enthusiastic in "innovation" brought a few founders inside, a small proof of concept lived in a corner, and then everything died in procurement limbo.
Without a proper system, "so basically you keep on working with old technology even though there’s a better technology out there," he warns. The culprits are "the limitations of your own internal teams" and "the limitations of your supply chain".
27pilots sells the opposite of that status quo: a repeatable way to scan the global startup ecosystem - which he calls "the biggest innovation supermarket and the most powerful innovation supermarket" - and plug its technologies into real products and processes.
Client venturing, in this sense, isn’t a side project. It’s an operating system for upgrading a corporation’s tech stack continuously using startups.
Why accelerators don’t fix the problem
"Well an accelerator is just generally a bad venture client process you cannot call it this way,"
Gregor Gimmy said to Entreprenerd
He has a critical visión about them. As he puts it: "why don’t I just find the best startups in the startup database I call them up and give them a purchase order that’s much faster, it’s much cheaper and the quality of startups will be much higher."
The outcome? "the output of accelerators are very very small... accelerators really are a mechanism for venture clienting that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work."
In other words, accelerators optimise for theatre; venture clienting optimises for throughput. One creates slides and press releases; the other creates supplier relationships and product advantages.
The next challenge for client venturing is to make this very unsexy plumbing visible enough that CEOs, boards and policymakers actually care about it.
Silicon Valley vs Europe: A cultural bug
Why is this shift so hard in Europe? Gimmy’s answer starts with history: "Well in the United States particularly in Silicon Valley most companies were born out of the startup ecosystem they know how special those companies are," he says.
And venture capital there is brutally selective: "when you get venture capital in Silicon Valley you get capital it’s one out of 10,000 startups that gets venture capital so it’s a very selective system."
That selectivity becomes a mental shortcut for big companies. "So companies there know this and when they see a startup that has a funding from a VC they get very curious, they wanna wow this must be an interesting technology because they got funded must be great people, must be great technology."
Europe’s corporate DNA is different. "Companies were not born out of venture capital, they were family owned, or they were privatizations from the state," he notes. People inside those organisations "never went through a startup" - so they don’t instinctively see startups as high-leverage partners.
That cultural gap feeds a familiar posture towards startups: controlling, extractive, entitled. The startup "owes" the corporation, instead of the corporation feeling lucky to access uniquely advanced technology.
Whether client venturing really scales in Europe will depend on how fast that culture can be rewired.
When presidents talk about the "technology gap"
Gimmy thinks this should go beyond corporate strategy decks and enter political speech.
"I think a very important next task is for top politicians and top management to start you know demanding and speaking and discussing Venture Clienting," he argues.
He wants venture clienting to show up whenever leaders talk about innovation, competitiveness or "strategic autonomy". This is why, in his view, "Top politicians, the European Union, the CEOs, they should start discussing this on that level and then the rest is just operational."
