How sturdy are Europe’s tech unicorns?

friends stayed in tech.” Fred Plais, the boss of Platform.sh, a cloud-computing company based in Paris, still remembers vividly what happened in Europe in 2001. The firm he ran back then, an online-search engine, closed down after the dotcom bubble burst—along with most of the other startups he knew. The story was much the same in 2008 as a result of the global financial crisis. European technology firms again suffered more than their American counterparts. Fears that the looming downturn and will once more hit harder in Europe than across the Atlantic were stoked on July 1st, when the reported that Klarna, a Swedish buy-now-pay-later darling, was trying to raise fresh capital at less than a fifth of its peak valuation of $46bn.