Editions

The pulse, tracked over years

Heartbeat exists to track the pulse of Europe's companies at their earliest stages - one reading a year, taken the same way each time, for as long as companies keep forming.

The ambition

A photograph becomes a film

A single edition is a photograph: 10,000 companies, one moment, taken from Cherry's dealflow and the public record. Read alone, it shows how Europe forms companies now.

Read in sequence, the editions become something no snapshot can be - a record of direction. We want to be able to say how the sector is evolving, and how the people forming its companies are changing over time: whether they still build alone, which fields pull them in, which cities hold them and which let them go.

A clinician does not read a heart from a single beat, but from the rhythm. That is the ambition for Heartbeat: a long enough series of readings that Europe's formation layer can be read as a pulse - its pace, its pattern, its changes - rather than guessed at from one moment.

What the sequence will show

The sector

Which fields form more companies and which fewer, and how the balance between software, deeptech, health and everything AI-native shifts year to year.

The founders

Who forms companies and how that changes: whether they build alone or arrive together, where they studied, where they worked, and how those pathways move.

The map

Which cities gain formation and which quietly lose it, and how the geography of founding redrafts itself across the continent.

The editions

The readings so far

Edition 01 · 2026
Heartbeat2026
Europe builds alone
79% of companies that have not yet raised from a fund have a single founder, against 46% of those that have. Technical depth still pulls founders into teams.

First of many

The pulse does not stop between editions