North America vs. Europe: Where Deep Tech Leaders Earn the Most

Everyone in deep tech assumes a North American CEO earns more than a European one. The real problem is that no one can prove it with public data, creating a market that operates on rumour and risk.

TL;DR

• The deep tech C-suite pay gap between North America and Europe is widely assumed but not publicly documented.
• This information asymmetry disadvantages companies and executive candidates in salary negotiations.
• Venture capital scale, risk appetite, and equity culture are primary drivers of the underlying disparity.

The observation: a global talent market with local blindfolds

The deep technology sector – encompassing quantum computing, advanced photonics, optics, and lasers – has evolved into a fundamentally global enterprise. Capital deployment routinely crosses national borders, fostering international scientific collaboration as the norm. Companies such as QMware AG is a Swiss company, are actively developing hybrid quantum applications tailored for the European market, while firms like Sinbiosys Srl, an Italian-based company, focus on highly specialised photonics solutions for global clients. This global interconnectedness extends naturally to the talent market, particularly for senior leaders: the Chief Executive Officers, Chief Technology Officers, and Chief Operating Officers tasked with translating pioneering lab breakthroughs into commercially viable companies. These individuals operate within a global pool of expertise, experience, and ambition.

Yet, when it comes to compensating these pivotal leaders, the market exhibits a peculiar fragmentation and opacity. A deeply ingrained assumption persists across the industry: executive compensation in North America substantially outstrips that in Europe. While this general trend is well-established in the broader technology sector, the precise figures and specific mechanisms for deep tech leadership roles are almost entirely absent from public discourse. Boards of directors, venture capital investors, and the executive candidates themselves are navigating this crucial phase of company formation and growth using a patchwork of anecdote, hearsay, and often outdated comparisons drawn from unrelated industries. According to Quantum People‘s 2026 Q3 Global Salary Guide, this pervasive information gap represents the single largest point of friction in senior-level hiring within the deep tech sector today. The consequence is a market that, despite its global nature, operates with severe local blindfolds, hindering efficient talent allocation.

This lack of transparency means that deep tech companies, especially those in nascent stages, struggle to establish competitive compensation structures. A European start-up, for instance, might genuinely believe it is crafting an attractive offer for a prospective CEO, only to discover it falls far short of what that candidate perceives as fair value based on North American market expectations. Conversely, a US-based executive, accustomed to a specific blend of cash remuneration and equity participation, may prematurely dismiss a promising European opportunity, unable to accurately assess its true financial potential against an opaque market. This situation is not merely an inconvenience; it represents a fundamental misalignment in a market that desperately needs precision. As deep tech firms transition from research-intensive entities to commercial enterprises, the ability to attract, reward, and retain top-tier leadership becomes paramount. Operating without clear benchmarks in this critical area introduces systemic inefficiencies and risks that undermine the sector’s overall growth trajectory.

The contrarian angle: the problem isn’t the gap, it’s the opacity

Much of the prevailing discussion surrounding executive compensation in deep tech, particularly concerning transatlantic differences, tends to focus on the presumed size of the pay gap itself. This framing, however, fundamentally misses the more critical and damaging issue. Quantum People posits that the magnitude of the disparity, while certainly a factor, is less detrimental to the industry’s health than the near-total absence of verifiable, public data that quantifies it. The market’s profound opacity is not merely an inconvenience; it constitutes a systemic risk, actively creating inefficiencies that harm every participant: companies, candidates, and investors alike.

Without transparent, data-backed benchmarks, every single senior executive hire transforms into a high-stakes negotiation fraught with incomplete information and inherent uncertainty. For a European board seeking to attract a seasoned CEO with experience scaling a deep tech venture, the lack of comparable data means they are effectively guessing at what constitutes a competitive offer in the global market. This exposes them to the dual risk of either significantly overpaying – thereby prematurely depleting precious early-stage capital – or, more commonly, underpaying and consequently losing their preferred candidate to a better-informed or better-capitalised North American competitor. This problem is exacerbated when these boards attempt to recruit leaders from outside the immediate deep tech ecosystem, who are accustomed to the rigorous, data-driven compensation analysis prevalent in more mature industries.

Similarly, for an executive candidate evaluating an offer, particularly one involving a cross-border move, the opacity is a significant career risk. They are forced to make pivotal decisions about their professional trajectory and financial future with, at best, partial information. The most valuable component of deep tech executive compensation, equity, is notoriously difficult to value in private companies, with its ultimate worth contingent on future funding rounds, market conditions, and eventual exit valuations – all highly speculative factors. Without robust benchmarks, candidates struggle to objectively compare offers, leading to potential misjudgements or an understandable reluctance to take on perceived unquantifiable risk.

This issue extends beyond simple fairness; it directly impacts the efficient allocation of the scarcest and most vital resource in deep tech: proven leadership capable of navigating the complex journey from scientific discovery to commercial success. The current opaque environment disproportionately favours insiders, those with extensive private networks, and established venture capital funds that possess proprietary, anecdotal data. It penalises exceptional candidates and newly formed boards that lack access to this privileged intelligence. Quantum People believes the discourse must shift decisively from merely debating “how big is the gap?” to confronting “why do we tolerate a leadership market that runs on guesswork and private networks, rather than data?”. This fundamental shift is essential for the deep tech sector to mature into a truly efficient and globally competitive industry.

The evidence: an absence of verifiable benchmarks

The most compelling evidence for the deep tech C-suite compensation challenge is, paradoxically, its absence. Public searches for specific, citable compensation data for Chief Executive Officers, Chief Technology Officers, or Chief Operating Officers within the quantum, photonics, or advanced optics sectors consistently yield no concrete figures. The salary and equity packages of privately held deep tech companies, which constitute the vast majority of the industry, are not publicly disclosed. While financial filings for publicly listed companies might offer some aggregated insights into executive pay, these are few and far between in deep tech, and the data is often too broad to be directly applicable to early-stage, high-growth ventures. The result is a pervasive informational void precisely where it is most needed.

This vacuum stands in stark contrast to the increasing legibility of the market for technical individual contributors within deep tech. In our previous analyses, Quantum People has meticulously documented the emergence of increasingly clear salary bands for roles such as quantum hardware engineers and research scientists. For example, Quantum People has explored specific benchmarks, such as the compensation profile highlighted in The $143K Quantum Hardware Physicist in North America, detailing a clear market rate for that role. Similarly, our Quantum Computing’s Global Pay Divide report has mapped specific salary ranges for engineers and scientists across different geographies, providing actionable insights for these positions. For a PhD-qualified individual with five years of experience in quantum hardware development, there is a reasonably well-understood market rate in innovation hubs like Boston, Oxford, or Zurich. Data points exist, aggregate salary surveys provide guidance, and the market for these roles is progressively becoming more transparent and predictable.

However, at the C-suite level, this legibility completely vanishes. The reasons for this disparity are largely structural and systemic. Firstly, the sheer number of executive hires in deep tech remains relatively small compared to the broader technical workforce. This low volume makes robust statistical analysis challenging and renders traditional public salary surveys largely ineffective. Secondly, executive compensation negotiations are inherently highly confidential, often bound by non-disclosure agreements. Companies have strong commercial incentives to keep these figures private to maintain competitive advantage and internal equity.

Thirdly, and perhaps most critically, the largest and often most motivating component of executive pay – equity – is notoriously difficult to value in a private company setting. The worth of a percentage stake in a pre-revenue or early-revenue deep tech company is highly speculative, dependent on future funding rounds, the company’s ability to hit ambitious technical milestones, its eventual market penetration, and the ultimate timing and valuation of an exit event (e.g., IPO or acquisition). Unlike a public stock price, there is no daily market rate for private equity. This inherent uncertainty in valuing the most significant portion of executive compensation creates a profound challenge for benchmarking and transparency.

The cumulative effect of these factors is a pervasive vacuum of reliable information. This forces deep tech boards and executive candidates to rely on imperfect proxies from more mature sectors such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) or traditional biotech. However, these industries often operate with vastly different risk profiles, capital structures, and talent dynamics compared to deep tech, rendering such comparisons misleading at best. The underlying drivers of the observed pay disparity, though unquantified at the C-suite level, are well understood. The North American venture capital market, for instance, is simply larger, deeper, and more mature. According to Quantum People’s proprietary market analysis, the average early-stage funding round for a deep tech company in North America remains significantly larger than its European equivalent. This greater abundance of available capital directly translates into the capacity for higher cash salaries and, crucially, larger and more attractive equity pools for leadership teams. Furthermore, there is a greater cultural acceptance of high-risk, high-reward equity packages in the United States, where a larger proportion of a leader’s potential compensation is intrinsically tied to the long-term success and exit valuation of the company. European investors and boards, while increasingly adopting similar models, have historically been slower to embrace this scale of equity participation, further contributing to the transatlantic divide.

The talent consequence: friction, mispricing, and lost opportunities

This pervasive data vacuum has profound and tangible consequences, creating significant friction for

Sources

• QuEra Computing and QMware AG Forge Partnership
• ☑️Sinbiosys Srl — Consulting organization from Italy…
• Vision
• How equity in tech companies works – by Nikhyl Singhal – The Skip
• Non-Disclosure Agreements: 10 Key Provisions You Need…
• Private Equity: No Mas