Inspired by Richard Florida’s piece in The Atlantic Cities, America’s Leading Metros for Venture Capital, I decided to craft a comparable bubble chart for Europe’s VC activity in 2012.

The European version of the map illustrates VC investment in all major European countries (excluding Russia and Turkey), with the amounts converted into US$ and indexed to the same scale as Richard Florida’s U.S. chart to facilitate comparison. Credit is due to the EVCA Yearbook for the underlying data and to HTML5 maven Nilanjan Basu for coding the interactive map.

As in 2011, UK startups are the greatest beneficiaries of venture capital, garnering 720 M€ (approx. $937M) from VC investors in 2012, which by the way is roughly close in size to the 7th largest market in the U.S. which was Seattle. Rounding out the top five were France, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark.

The total VC funds invested in startups in all of Europe in 2012 reached approximately 3.5 B€, which represents about 1/3 of that in the San Francisco bay area alone.

But before jumping to any further conclusions, I’ll invite any observations from the readers.