AMSTERDAMBRUSSELS, April 15 Reuters After years of struggling to raise capital in European Union markets, Mews a hospitality software firm with Czech roots finally secured funding by registering as a Dutch company.

For its next step, Mews is looking even further from home and considering listing in the United States, highlighting the problem of startups leaving the 27nation bloc in order to grow.

While the EU offers a huge single market for products and services, it still has 27 capital markets with a maze of different securities laws, taxes and accounting.

It was an awful process, Mews CEO Matt Welle said of the obstacles faced in accessing European markets, where all the rules are different in each country.

Such difficulties are harming EU ambitions to compete with China and the U.S. in the global shift to the growth industries of the future, centred around green and digital technologies.

The European Commission, the EU39;s executive arm, says Europe will need 650 billion euros 692 billion around 4.5 of its economy of extra investment a year until 2030 to compete.

That, it argues, can only come from the private sector.

For a company like Mews, Welle says the most likely route for an initial public offering IPO is the United States because that market understands what we39;ve done … and there39;s just more liquidity there.

Swedish music streaming service Spotify and Germany39;s biotech firm BioNtech are prominent among the many companies which have crossed…