How much it costs to raise a VC fund (a lot!), ways of due diligence and valuing VC rounds, living in Europe vs US, pizza from Macedonia and what people do to impact the climate.
#12
This is the twelfth edition of Sunday CET, a weekly curation of what we found interesting in the European investment tech landscape.
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1. More money in the market
2. How others are doing it
3. Interesting bets
4. Data, research, observations
5. What others think
1. More money in the market
🇸🇪 Bonnier Ventures wants to invest $25 million per year in tech startups.
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🇬🇧 Former Uber exec Jambu Palaniappan has joined OMERS Ventures as managing partner in London. Palaniappan has spent the past 12 months as executive-in-residence at Atomico.
2. How others are doing it
🇬🇧 On fundraising and privilege - how difficult and expensive is raising an investment fund aimed at overlooked people and overlooked markets.
🇬🇧 UK-based venture company Atomico announced a second year batch for its Angel Programme
🇫🇷 Inside La French Tech - details about how a government-funded organisation sets up the foundation for startup innovation in France.
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🇫🇮 Americans discover that living in Europe is cool, the Finnish edition - there’s more to it, American media is biased against European living standards 👇
🇫🇷 Comparing France and US Systems: NYT Opinionators Wear Blinkers - and, of course, there is the other side of the table: European good living standards lead to complacency 👇
🇩🇪 A German journalist upon returning to homeland after living in Asia (in English)
Except for family/friends or social system, there are no real reasons to return.
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🇲🇰 Meanwhile in Macedonia, there is this startup named Slice that built an app for pizza delivery in America.
Slice was founded by Ilir Sela, an Albanian by birth, grown up on Staten Island. Most of friends and family of Ilir own and operate pizzerias in the greater New York City area and his grandparents owned a pizzeria in Manhattan in the 70s.
Slice operates a website and an app that lets people search for pizzerias in their area — over 6,000 nationwide — and place an order online. The pizzerias handle deliveries themselves and pay a flat fee of $1.95 per order to Slice.
Simple and sweet. Even more remarkable: Slice is headquartered in Macedonia, where it employs more than 500 people in a country which has 30%+ unemployment rate.
Fwiw, Macedonia has about 2 mil people and Skopje, the capital, 600k.
Slice was founded in 2009 and yep, is backed by venture money - raised $30 million from US-based VC funds.
Oh, and this:
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🇩🇪 What reduces our personal CO2 footprint? We have no clue!
We asked 1500 Americans and 1500 Germans to select from a list of seven personal actions the one that has the strongest impact on reducing the CO2 footprint of an average person.
Results:
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an informal thread with specific answers about what people do for impacting climate change.
Bonus
How do investors go about due diligence and how long it actually takes them - thread
Investors instant disqualifiers when meeting entrepreneurs - thread.
3. Interesting bets
🇫🇷 France
e-grocery app which combines recipes, recommendations and online grocery ordering | $7 million | Stride.VC, DST, eventures
B2B marketplace between brand and physical points of sale | €6 million | Alven, Global Founders Capital, Aglaé Ventures
manufacturer of a smart T-shirt that monitors six key physiological parameters — and can be machine-washed | iBionext, Adrea, Celeste Management
🇩🇪 Germany
all-inclusive car subscription provider | €8.8 million | HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Heartcore Capital, Unternehmertum Venture Capital Partners, Picus Capital
energy grid digitization startup | €6 million | eCAPITAL, Demeter, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF)
industrial AI developer | €1.3 million | The High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), Innovationsstarter Fonds Hamburg (IFH), angel investors.
music startup aspiring to become the largest social media platform for beat making music creators | €450K | Gismart
manufacturer of autonomously flying delivery drones for social and civilian applications | Corecam Capital Partners
🇳🇱 Netherlands
producer of meat derived from animal cells | $10 million | angel investors ($7m!), EU grant ($3m)
operator of a network of fast-charging stations in the Netherlands | €7.5 million
🇵🇹 Portugal
provider of internet-free communication via mesh networking | $3 million | EDP Ventures, Deutsche Telekom, AngelPad, Caixa Capital, NovaBase Capital, Mustard Seed
🇷🇴 Romania
tech platform allowing financial services providers to automate and personalize the digital customer experience quickly | $14 million | Earlybird, OTB Ventures, Gapminder Ventures, Launchub
🇪🇸 Spain
analytics platform identifying social trends and concerns as it discovers, categorizes and synthesizes people’s opinions from large quantities of data | €1.5 million | Wayra, H & S Investment, Bankinter, IDB Lab, Everis
🇸🇪 Sweden
🇨🇭 Switzerland
SaaS-based data analytics approach to security that can help stop the theft of IP and keep track of all enterprise data | $13 million | Vertex Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Crane Venture Partners, former FB execs
company that converts any shop into a “virtual ATM” | €7.7 million
🇬🇧 UK
graphene electronics technology company | £3.4 million | Draper Esprit, Parkwalk, IQ Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, Cambridge Enterprise
marketplace for creative freelancers | €535K | Y-Combinator, TechStars, Momo
low-code, easy to use, integration platform helping SaaS business to respond to user integration requests without adding to the development backlog | £500k | Juno Capital
4. Research, data, observations
🇪🇺 10 things you need to know about the Nordic investment market in November 2019.
🇪🇺 Data driven insights about VC-backed start-ups in Europe
Start-up growth can be sorted in five profiles – laggards, commoners, all-rounders, visionaries and superstars.
Laggards dwindle, commoners grow mildly, all-rounders record considerable progress across all indicators, visionaries’ intangibles skyrocket and finally, superstars’ growth is astronomical on all fronts.
Apart from laggards, VC made every other profile grow considerably more than their non-VC-backed counterparts. Furthermore, almost half of high growth start-ups would have either fallen into a less successful profile or defaulted in the absence of VC. Overall, when an entrepreneurial idea has a high potential for success, the “VC factor” expands their opportunities for growth and enables start-ups to unleash their full potential.
🇳🇴 Norwegian media group Schibsted released a report with an outlook on 2020 trends.
🇫🇮 Finland will make the Elements of AI online course freely available in all 27 official EU languages.
🇸🇪 Deported engineer sues Sweden over work permit rejections
🇪🇺 Top cities for artificial intelligence
Bonus:
5. What others think
🇳🇴
Strategy A: we are raising X million on a Y million pre-money valuation.
Strategy B: we are raising A-B million in exchange for somewhere between Y-X% of our company.
How do you go about your venture ask?
🇩🇪 Earlybird’s rationale behind its first SpaceTech investment.
🇮🇱 What does exactly mean for Angular Ventures to be an early-stage, deep tech fund
🇳🇴 Corporates beware — investing in startups is a different ball game
🇫🇮 Marketing Tech: the 4 most exciting areas for future early-stage investments
🇪🇸 Start-ups fall for Barcelona’s tech hub allure
Bonus:
Happy Sunday!
Thanks for reading 🙌
Created by @drnovac every Sunday. Please share it with people who may find it interesting - thanks! Feedback at dragos@nordic9.com.