Austria’s biotech and pharma future continues to look bright with recent news that a national Startup & Scaleup Fund will come to fruition. This development underscores BioSpace conversations with industry stakeholders at recent conferences that lay out why Austria is making a name in the life science landscape.
As part of the 2027/2028 federal budget, the Austrian government has pledged an anchor investment of up to €100 million for a dedicated capital growth fund. Every euro of public anchor investment is intended to leverage four euros of private capital. This translates into up to half a billion euros in growth capital for Austrian companies.
While the fund is not purely biotech-focused, Biotech Austria, the association of the Austrian biotechnology industry, is heavily lobbying for most of the capital to go into the life sciences, said Board Member Dr. Guido Gualdoni.
According to a February 2026 Elsevier report, Austria is “a hidden champion in science and technology.” The report noted that while international attention frequently gravitates toward larger research nations, “Austria consistently performs significantly better than what may be expected from its size.”
The report added: “The high quality of Austria’s universities and research institutions, their broad international connections and collaborations including industry and society, and the ability to translate scientific excellence into innovation are central to Austria’s strength.”
Research hubs
The capital Vienna is Austria’s primary biotech hub and scientific center and hosts most companies: more than 50% of all life science companies are located here, wrote Liesa Doppler, program lead for Life Science Austria (LISA), in an email. LISA is the umbrella group that brings together six regional life science clusters.
“As a key gateway to Europe the city also attracts international trade fairs and conferences in the life sciences sector, e.g. BIO-Europe,” she wrote. “Vienna is particularly strong in therapeutics and vaccines, diagnostics, medtech and digital health, as well as international pharma companies.”
Vienna is also an excellent talent hub, in the sense of having industry executives exiting and building their next company, said Gualdoni, who is also CEO and co-founder of Epitome Therapeutics, and a serial biotech entrepreneur. This talent circulation phenomenon has continuously increased in the last couple of years, he added.
Graz, capital of the Styria region in the southeast, has developed an integrated ecosystem around the Medical Science City Graz concept, where university medicine, clinical practice, applied research organizations and companies sit physically close together. The network is coordinated by the regional cluster Human.technology Styria (HTS).
HTS currently connects 150+ companies and research organizations working across medical technologies, pharma and biotechnology, digital health, diagnostics, health data, bioprocessing and health and sustainability, wrote Pablo Zardoya, a business developer at HTS, in an email. The cluster community has generated approximately €4.1 billion in revenue.
In addition, Styria is a top innovation leader in Europe, investing 5.17% of the GDP in R&D, whereas the E.U. average is 2.24%, he stated.
The strengths of the ecosystem in Innsbruck, capital of Austria’s western state of Tyrol, are based on a combination of university medicine, clinical research, pharmaceutical activity and specialized biotech firms as well as medical technology/engineering, Doppler wrote.
The regional anchor is the Cluster Life Sciences Tirol. A recent advancement is Health Hub Tirol, which provides lab space, startup infrastructure and commercialization support in the region; this is important as there had been a dearth of lab space. Tyrol is also home to Europe’s last major vertically integrated penicillin production network, located at Sandoz’s site in Kundl.
Lower Austria has activities in “technopoles” –technology hubs in Krems, Tulln and Wiener Neustadt– focused on healthtech, biobased tech and medical and material tech. Upper Austria maintains a reputation for a strong medtech sector supported by a dedicated Medical Technology Cluster.
Salzburg is the youngest cluster member in the LISA network and has recently positioned life sciences as a strategic priority through the “Life Sciences Masterplan Salzburg” and the new Life Sciences Center Salzburg. The activities revolve mainly around diagnostics, dental technology and nutritional supplements with growing capabilities in immunology, neuroscience and regenerative medicine, Doppler wrote.
Funding possibilities
Austria’s dynamic research and collaboration environment is supported by a very strong nondilutive funding environment, especially for early-stage possibilities, Gualdoni said. They include FFG, Austria Wirtschaftsservice and Wirtschaftsagentur Wien.
Life science-specialized VCs established in Austria include XISTA Science Ventures and Calm/Storm Ventures. Speedinvest has health and bio as one of its six verticals.
The new Startup & Scaleup Fund is intended to nurture the VC ecosystem, Gualdoni said. The government acts like a limited partner, investing capital in VCs which then deploy investment in companies. The initiative could mobilize pension fund involvement in biotech financing, he added.
As BioSpace has previously discussed in past Denatured podcasts on the European financing landscape, the dearth of pension fund involvement in European capital creates a massive scale-up funding gap. In turn, Europe’s innovative companies are forced to rely on foreign capital while depriving local savers of higher investment returns.
Despite the challenges, Austria’s future in the global biotech setting looks bright, especially with the Startup & Scaleup Fund initiative. “The analysis highlights strengths in Clinical & Health, the Life Sciences, and selected technical domains, while also showing that excellence is broadly distributed across disciplines and institutions,” the Elsevier report noted. “These patterns underscore the structural resilience of the Austrian research system amid intensifying global competition.”