Where does the data come from?

The startups featured in the Deep Tech Finder have been identified through a careful matching of European startups listed in Dealroom – a global data platform for intelligence on startups – with the EPO's own register of patent applicants. A similar approach was applied to universities by matching the European Patent Register to European universities listed in the European Higher Education Sector Observatory (EHESO) microdata.

When building the tool our priority was reliability. As a result, some European startups may be missing if they are not included in the original data, or could not be safely matched to an EPO applicant. The scope of the Deep Tech Finder is restricted to startups defined by Dealroom as being at the founding, early or late growth stages. Regarding university data, the EHESO data source lists unique IDs for universities, making it possible to create an aggregation of university names for all universities in EPO member states. We limited our matches to the category “Higher Education Institution” (HEI) in EHESO microdata, and added a few universities identified as missing in the EHESO database. To further align the university-level data with the reality of national university systems, all datasets were reviewed and corrected by national patent offices (NPOs) of EPO member states, that participate in collaboration projects from the EPO’s Observatory on Patents and Technology.

University spin-outs are designated using Dealroom definition. Spin-outs are startups in which universities hold equity stakes and/or have royalty or licensing agreements. The patent data have been further enriched by the EPO to enable searches according to the technological field(s) of their inventions, using special queries developed by the EPO's examiners in their respective fields of expertise.