baby it's cold outside
#64
Hey guys, how are you all doing?
Writing this from a remote cabin at the Swedish/Norwegian border - lotsa snow, -15 Celsius, great company, a fireplace, good whisky and the wrapping up with what I noticed in the Euro landscape this week.
Let’s get to it.
Euro strat
❄️ Powder:
🇬🇧 PSG
🇫🇷 Eurazeo
🇮🇱 FinTLV
🇫🇷 BPIfrance
🇮🇪 Frontline Ventures
🇪🇸 Inveready
🇬🇧 ACF
🔥 Interesting deals:
🇩🇰 Vivino
🇩🇪 logistics SAAS
🇪🇪 marketplace for in-home and personal care
🇫🇷 B2B mental therapy sessions
🇬🇧 compound learning thru a digital annotation tool
🇳🇴 smart-wheel technology that allows users to move heavy objects indoors using a smartphone app or voice commands.
🇪🇺 More food startups announced this week: grocery delivery 1, 2 + dark kitchen + alternative food + marketplace
We actually did a report about interesting food delivery startups from Europe that raised money in 2020.
🇩🇪 Speaking of grocery startups, one of the two founders of Gorilla left the company after just 10 months, 800 employees hired and 40 million raised.
Founders chemistry is the #1 cause for failure in a startup btw.
🇫🇷 Really like what Not so dark is doing with creating food brands on top of a dark kitchen operation (they just raised 20 mil). Also like the realism of their founder saying that there is a 6-month opportunity window, and the time to accelerate is now, if you want to build a meaningful business that is.
🇳🇴 A Norwegian startup listed on the NYSE via a SPAC. It is a Northvolt wannabe targeting a 2025 launch of a battery cell manufacturing facility. Fortuna ceca est.
🇪🇺 A bunch of high profile investors bought The New European, a British pro-EU weekly newspaper launched in 2016 when the Brexit referendum was decided.
I am bullish as ever on media startups, just browse any random media site without ad blockers and you will immediately understand that the media problem is an opportunity in disguise.
Also, smart content for smart people will beat useless clickbait and clicks/ads delivery quotas.
And so, if you wanted to launch a new print newspaper today, it’d probably look a lot like The New European.
🇪🇺 Fintech startups from the Nordics - the new wave of unicorn wannabes.
🤓 Other observations:
🇪🇺 Last week we put online a new version of Nordic 9.
For those who don’t know, N9 is a project tracking the European startup deals and putting on top a data platform interface for making it easy to understand the intel.
I did N9 for two reasons: i) I consume an unhealthy amount of intel data every day and I tend to forget it (getting old, I know), so an aggregated source to find something in a few clicks comes in handy and ii) I hate bad software, and I find most of the market providers borderline unusable, be them data, intel or media.
And so I was lucky enough to have a strong tech partner who built for me a little toy 4 years ago, covering the Nordic market, iterating and learning along the way. We started it as a hack and built on top of it until it became unscalable so we had to make a decision to build a new one last summer. It took us a bit of time to re-create a new product that has wider scope and can be SAAS scalable and here we are.
We are also lucky to have a handful of customers who gave us great feedback along the way, some of them going quite deep in methodologies or business cases, which we learnt a lot from.
The data now covers the entire European landscape and is becoming quite sizable, we track the activity of more than a 1000 active investors every month, and the whole social graph is coming along pretty nicely.
So who is it for?
For once, it is for people like me who want to take the pulse of what is going on in a vertical or in a country. And I mean now - this month or this quarter - not sometimes last year based on some big macro numbers which mean a lot for very few people from the market. Take fintech, for example. Or health or food and so on.
Then, a great number of our customers are startups, since I work anyway with startup people looking to either get funded or to grow their operation to get fundable. It is a case that can be a standalone business by itself.
Another one we notice is investors looking for local deal flow and granular intel - we track a considerable number of deals under $5 million and have a decent data coverage of angels/early stage investors active in Europe.
We also added cheat sheet reports on top of the data (have more than 50 reports to date) - snackable market intel with actionable insights or valuable pieces of information - all for people who usually need just to learn the essentials from a sea of noise. (who has time for a 1000-words report or a 50-slide deck nowadays anyway?)
The product is still in beta and we’re still rolling stuff out - I’m actually quite excited about what we can build on top of what we have, one of the reasons for taking the time to re-construct the whole product in a proper way.
Just like Nordic 9, the ecosystem we provide value for is also very young and growing. The European startup landscape is in early emerging stages, and I believe our timing as also a startup helping other startups is fitting.
And I also believe that a laser-focused product, with good data, useful intel and great UX should be a good value proposition for anybody part of the ecosystem. And that is my bet with N9.
🇧🇪 A January in European tech - a great wrap-up about Europe, where Robin notices that the deals frenzy on the continent is up and to the right.
Well, it’s not a secret that the market is absolutely full of money so that kind of explains it - there’s record raised by European funds, and Americans and Asian (Chinese) are also very active, the Euro investment effervescence is just a consequence.
And competition is the sole driver of making an interesting market a better one. Not regulation.
🇸🇪 Daniel Ek’s investment company (the one that should manage the $1 billion investment commitment) is run by Shakil Khan, who was one of the first investors in Spotify. And they just hired Brett Bivens, an American investor living in France, whose work outside work you should follow, if you don’t already.
🇪🇺 good Euro e-commerce data breakdown
🇨🇭Who is the Most Active Swiss Family Office Dealmaker?
🇬🇧 Atomico announced the new batch of Euro scouts… err, the new batch of its angel program (3rd year already).
🇪🇺 Here’s a list with the new generation of VC kids.
🇩🇪 One problem with the old money from Europe, which mainly means rich families handling high stakes business, is that members of those families fight a lot and destroy shareholders value. Not very much different from what you read in history books about clan fights - related reading.
🇪🇺 In Germany, France & Brussels, there is often the mistaken sense that US platform dominance is uncontested. But a look at leading e-commerce platforms by country shows that China's AliExpress is the leading online marketplace for V4 countries, the Netherlands & others.
🇪🇺 How you can buy popularity with money, the Google in Europe example.
🇩🇪 Good media business done by RTL - bought SpotX in 2017, it was valued at $400 million, and sold it for $1.17B.
🇸🇪 Oatly is reportedly considering an IPO at a valuation of ~$10 billion.
🇫🇷 81-person French orgy broken up for violating COVID-19 curfew
Data of the week
High growth sports, outdoor & recreation categories, Dec 2020.
Drones delivery costs at scale compared to competitor costs.
Other stuff
Substack writers selling a bundle leave the platform to operate their own product, raise $600k in funding.
Substack writers will start to professionalize and chase big returns rather than running a 1000 subscribers lifestyle project, we talked about this in #62.
I love it when people take risks to build something like this, unlikely to see something similar in Europe tbh.
Hubspot bought a NL operation, The Hustle, for $27 million.
1.5 mil subscribers, content focused on small biz and entrepreneurship. A lead gen machine in the right hands.
How Jessica Lessin got people to pay for The Information
How We Took Instagram To A Billion Users | Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger
Why Colleges and Universities Should be Scared of the On Deck Fellowship. We talked about this in extenso, with the EF case study.
Google Maps' moat is evaporating.
Americans purchased more than 2 million firearms last month, an 80% increase from a year earlier.
Why webcams aren’t good enough.
The Shocking Meltdown of Ample Hills - Brooklyn’s Hottest Ice Cream Company.
Netflix Totally Dominates Golden Globes With 35% of All Nominations
Whatever you do in life, it helps to have a following - Confessions of an Instagram Influencer
Happy Sunday!
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