Czech Startup Association

The Czech Startup Association welcomes the EU Inc. proposal's adoption as a regulation. This will ensure strong harmonization of legislation across all EU Member States, which could not be achieved to the same extent through a directive. Practical advantages include the proposals fully digital approach and the first truly ambitious steps towards harmonizing ESOPs and startup financing.

The core design should be narrow, digital-first, and focused strictly on company law. Europe needs one company form, one registry, one market: a modern EU company type with harmonized rules on formation, governance, share classes, pre-emption, information rights, and transparent cap tables.

Public procurement is one of Europes strongest demand-side levers, but for many startups and scaleups it remains a high-cost, low-probability channel. When procedures favour incumbents, taxpayers miss better solutions and young firms lose the quickest route to reference customers, revenue, and scale.

The Czech Startup Association welcomes the European Innovation Act as a one-off chance to make the Single Market work for innovators. Europes problem is not the ideas themselves, but scaling them up. Fragmented rules, heavy compliance requirements, and uneven access to capital and infrastructure hinder founders, deter investors, and prompt scale-ups to seek opportunities abroad.

The Czech Startup Association welcomes the Commissions decision to adapt the Rescue & Restructuring Guidelines and, in particular, to reconsider how the undertaking in difficulty (UiD) concept applies to startups and scaleups. The current framework was designed around debt-financed, asset-heavy firms.

1) Why this reform matters: Europe does not mainly have a startup creation problem. It has a scale-up capital problem. Too many promising companies can raise seed financing in the EU, but struggle once larger rounds are needed.