Most commentary about "the market" is written from the top down: analysts take GDP, divide by assumptions, and publish a number. We took the opposite route, we counted. This thesis summarises what 4,840,019 verified companies with $1M to $300M+ in estimated revenue actually look like across the EU (2,241,692 companies) and the US (2,598,327).

Companies by estimated revenue bandEU vs US. Note the long base of the pyramid below $25M.

Source: Veltria dataset, 4,840,019 companies, computed 2026-07-09.

1. The market is a pyramid, and the base is enormous

4,672,939 companies, 96.5% of the universe, sit below $25M in revenue. This is the segment that never makes league tables and rarely has an IR page, yet it is where the majority of B2B purchasing decisions in both economies are made. The median company in our dataset has $2.3M (EU) / $2.7M (US) in estimated revenue and 11–12 employees.

4,672,939

EU + US companies under $25M in estimated revenue, the invisible base of the B2B economy.

2. Europe makes things; America codes and heals

The single sharpest structural difference between the two markets: Europe has 194,789 manufacturing & industrial companies in this revenue range against 104,951 in the US, a 1.9x gap. Reverse the lens and the US leads in technology (118,920 vs 146,948) and healthcare (177,236 vs 121,285).

For strategy teams this is not trivia. It means a US-calibrated ICP model will systematically under-weight Europe's industrial core, and a European industrial playbook will find a thinner target list in the US than expected.

3. Ownership: the succession wave is real

383,450 companies, 7.9% of the universe, are classified as family-owned. Private equity, for all its noise, holds just 56,666 companies (1.2%). The gap between those two numbers is the single largest opportunity in the lower middle market: founder-owned businesses that will change hands in the next decade, most without a banker.

4. What this means for buyers of this data

Investors: the $5–25M base is too large to browse, screen it by sector × geography × revenue band and work a defined universe.
Sales teams: your TAM is probably bigger and more fragmented than your CRM suggests; territory design should follow the actual density map, not intuition.
Consultants: bottom-up counts beat top-down extrapolation. Every chart in this thesis is reproducible from the dataset.

The full universe behind this thesis, all 4.8 million companies, starts at $6 for a custom slice.

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