No European Secfi Equivalent
Q&A with Balthazar de Lavergne and Mathias Pastor at Semper
This gap means European startup equity is still missing the financial layer that turns paper ownership into usable wealth. In the U.S., companies like Secfi help employees exercise options, borrow against shares, and plan taxes before an IPO or acquisition. In Europe, country by country tax rules, different option schemes, and lower employee familiarity with equity have kept that product stack fragmented, so equity often remains something employees hold passively instead of actively managing.
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Semper is filling part of that hole from the company side, not the employee finance side. It helps issuers run recurring secondary programs, lets employees model sale and tax outcomes, and aggregates outside buyers into one cap table line, but it is not primarily an option financing product like Secfi.
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The missing European equivalent is not just about one company. Europe has no single stock option framework. Tax treatment can hit at grant, vesting, exercise, or sale depending on country and instrument, which makes it much harder to build one standardized product for employees across the region.
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That helps explain why European employees treat equity more like a bonus than salary. When people cannot easily finance an exercise, get tax guidance, or take partial liquidity, they are less likely to view their shares the way U.S. tech workers do, as an asset to optimize over time.
The next phase is a convergence of European secondaries and employee financial tooling. As more late stage European companies run repeat liquidity programs and share more investor information, the market gets easier to underwrite. That should create room for Europe native products that combine tax guidance, option exercise financing, and controlled liquidity into a more complete employee equity stack.