Barbara Cagigal sits at the crossroads of British diplomacy and European startup policy. From a city that has become a symbol of the continent's entrepreneurial ambition, she is helping rewrite the rules that govern how new companies are born, funded, and scaled.

by Kasun Illankoon, Editor in Chief at Tech Revolt

[For more news, click here]

Lisbon is a city that has learned to reinvent itself. Its Atlantic light, its dense history, its position as a gateway between Europe and the world have made it, over the past decade, one of the continent's most watched startup hubs. It is also, perhaps fittingly, the base of operations for two of the more interesting roles in European policy right now, both held by the same person.

Barbara Cagigal advises on trade as a Senior Policy Adviser for the UK's Department for Business and Trade, based at the British Embassy here. She is also the Head of Standards and Policy at the Europe Startup Nations Alliance, known as ESNA, an organisation headquartered in this same city and charged with a task of considerable ambition: persuading more than two dozen European governments to meaningfully reform the conditions in which startups are created, funded, and scaled.

The two roles are complementary in ways that are not immediately obvious. One is rooted in the bilateral relationship between Britain and Portugal, managing the commercial threads that run between two countries with centuries of shared economic history. The other is a continent-wide undertaking, working across 26-plus member states to harmonise policy frameworks that, in too many places, remain ill-suited to the companies Europe says it wants to build.

Speaking exclusively to Tech Revolt, Cagigal offers a clear-eyed account of where European startup policy stands, what is working, and where the continent still needs to be braver.

Policy as a form of coordination

Ask Cagigal to describe what her work at ESNA actually looks like on a given day, and her answer cuts quickly to the organisational challenge at its core.

"ESNA's work is fundamentally about coordination. The organisation was established after the signing of the Startup Nations Standard ministerial declaration, by countries committing to a shared set of policy benchmarks. Translating that political commitment into actual implementation, across very different national contexts, is what occupies the organisation day to day."

In practice, that translates into three simultaneous workstreams. The first is direct technical support: working alongside government teams as they design or refine specific policies, whether that is a regulatory sandbox, a startup visa scheme, or reforms to how employee stock options are taxed. The second is benchmarking. ESNA's annual Startup Nations Standards Report is the most visible output of this work, but the underlying engine is a continuous process of data collection and comparative analysis across all participating countries. The third is convening.

"Policy convergence across 27-plus countries does not happen through a single decisive moment," she explains. "It happens through the steady accumulation of countries learning from each other. ESNA's role is to make that learning faster, more structured, and more visible, so that a reform proven in one capital becomes a credible option in the next."

The standard nobody talks about enough

ESNA works with eight Startup Nations Standards, a framework agreed by signatory governments covering everything from the speed of company incorporation to access to talent from outside the European Union. When pressed on which of those standards is most underestimated, Cagigal's answer is pointed and, on reflection, persuasive: public procurement.

"The public sector is typically the single largest buyer in a national economy. How it purchases, meaning tender requirements, reference periods, lot sizes, and appetite for risk, shapes which companies can credibly compete for that demand. When procurement is designed for innovation, the demand becomes a major engine for emerging European companies."

It is, she acknowledges, a harder reform to achieve than others. The incentives inside procurement systems tend to favour incumbents and predictability. But she argues the leverage it provides is significantly greater than most people assume, particularly right now.

"This matters even more in the current competitiveness context, where the strategic technologies Europe wants to build, like defence, AI, clean energy, cybersecurity, often have the state as their natural first customer," she says. "Instruments like pre-commercial procurement, innovation partnerships, and startup-friendly tender design are precisely how public demand can translate into European industrial capacity."

Progress, measured

The most recent Startup Nations Standards Report, published in February 2026, carried a headline number that rewarded close reading: the average implementation rate of startup-friendly policies across Europe had reached 70 percent, up from 61 percent the previous year. For a body of work that depends on persuading sovereign governments to act, that is a meaningful shift in a short time.

Cagigal attributes a significant part of that momentum to the visibility the SNS framework creates.

"The SNS framework helps governments benchmark progress, identify gaps, and learn from reforms introduced elsewhere in Europe, which creates momentum for implementation. The report also reflects a broader shift towards treating startup policy as part of national competitiveness and innovation strategies."

Governments, it turns out, respond to comparison. Being able to see, in a structured and public format, how a peer country has approached a given standard, and what outcomes followed, changes the conversation in ministerial offices in ways that abstract advocacy rarely does.

But she is clear-eyed about where the work remains incomplete. "Important gaps remain," she says. "Innovation in Regulation continues to be the lowest-performing standard, highlighting that many regulatory systems are still not sufficiently adapted to startup realities, while stock options frameworks and visa systems for non-EU talent also would benefit from less fragmentation across Europe."

Common standards, national solutions

One of the more intellectually interesting tensions in ESNA's work is the gap between the universality of its goals and the particularity of each national context. Portugal, Germany, and Lithuania are not simply different in scale. They differ in legal tradition, administrative culture, political economy, and the state of their existing startup ecosystems. A policy instrument that works efficiently in one may be entirely unsuitable for another.

Cagigal's framing of this challenge is careful and worth dwelling on.

"Common standards function best as a floor, a shared benchmark of what every signatory country should be working toward, rather than as a uniform template. The eight Startup Nations Standards define a common direction; the implementation has to be national."

The approach that follows from this is evidence-led rather than prescriptive.

"When engaging with countries, we bring comparative evidence rather than templates: here is how peer countries have approached a given Standard, here is what worked in each context, here are the trade-offs. Countries then design the version that fits their political and institutional realities."

Harmonisation at the level of objective; flexibility at the level of instrument. That balance, she suggests, is what keeps the standards usable in practice rather than only on paper.

The one thing she would change

For all the progress the SNS Reports document, Cagigal identifies one persistent structural problem that sits beneath much of it: the fragmentation of the single market the moment a startup begins to cross borders and scale.

"One of the biggest remaining challenges for European startups is still the fragmentation of the single market when companies begin to scale across borders," she says, before noting that the discussion has recently taken a more promising turn.

The so-called 28th Regime, a proposed pan-European framework that would allow companies to operate under a common ruleset for incorporation, employment, and stock options, has begun attracting serious political attention.

"The SNS Report consistently shows that startups benefit most when regulation becomes simpler, more predictable, and easier to navigate across jurisdictions. If Europe can make real progress on reducing that fragmentation, it would significantly strengthen the ability of startups to scale within Europe rather than looking elsewhere as they grow."

The implication is clear. Europe has made genuine strides in building startup-friendly conditions at a national level. The harder, more consequential work is building the connective tissue between those national systems, so that a company that starts in Tallinn or Lisbon or Warsaw can grow across the continent without encountering a new set of legal and administrative obstacles at every border.

On being based in Lisbon

There is something fitting about this work being anchored in a city that has itself become a reference point for what a national commitment to startup culture can produce. Cagigal's assessment of Lisbon is measured rather than effusive, but it is pointed.

"Lisbon offers an environment that reflects the kind of ecosystem we are helping to build," she says, "internationally connected, open to talent, and supported by a clear policy signal from the Portuguese government." It is, in other words, not just a backdrop. It is a working illustration of the argument ESNA is making to governments across the continent.

For a policy professional whose job is to show what is possible, there are worse places to be.

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