The ESIL Angel Academy, launched this autumn, bets the continent needs better business angels, not just more. Still, training angels is only one part of the equation. The question is whether all that new skill adds up to a market that actually works. On that, Europe’s record is uneven.

Few people have a longer view of it than Luigi Amati. A director and co-founder of META Group, chairman emeritus of Business Angels Europe, founder of Italian Angels for Growth, and one of the people steering ESIL (the Early Stage Investing Launchpad), he has spent more than 35 years watching the European angel scene grow, disproportionately.

His starting point is straight: there is no such thing as “European angel investing” as a single, homogeneous market. By his reckoning, the UK and Europe’s least-developed markets sit about twenty years apart. Amati is just as specific about what keeps the gap open — the culture around risk and trust, the national tax breaks that pin money in place, a missing belief that Europe can grow its own global champions — and about what a careful angel should actually do to start making a change.

Following his insights to the ground, we turn to the prospects of Central and Eastern Europe ecosystems, handing the thread to two people building there. Cosmin Curticapean, Vice-President of TechAngels Romania, is bringing ESIL’s first angel workshops to Moldova, while Sara Anselmo of META Group leads ESIL Moldova and works on a stubborn gap of its own: who gets into the room, and who gets funded once they’re there.

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