Spanish and French startups to follow, the most active investors in Europe, the most downloaded mobile game of the decade is from Europe and predictions for Europe’s startup scene.

Dec 22, 2019

This is the 13th 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

🇳🇱 Kempen European Private Equity Fund closed its investment fund at €192.5 million

🇪🇸 Suma Capital announced the first closing of a new €125 million vehicle to invest between €6 to €8 million in companies with positive EBITDA

🇩🇰 Scale Capital announced a $22 million technology fund to back Danish startups.

Sapphire Ventures, the former corporate venture arm of SAP, has raised $1.4 billion for growth investments in the U.S., Europe and Israel

2. How others are doing it

🇨🇿 JetBrains, a Prague based developer tools company behind IntelliJ, in 2018:

$270M revenue/ 33% growth
$100M net income/ $134M free cash flow
6M users/ 405k customers
$0 raised since founding in 2000
~$350,000 revenue/employee (assume 2019 grew ~30% rev YoY)
50% FCF % in 2018 is insane -- highest margin for dev tools company. Higher than $TEAM which is 32%
~$600 annual revenue/customer. 👏 considering add 2k individual customers/day

🇫🇮 A €300 million company valuation in just 6 years (Smartly.io)

🇪🇸 Yet another European unicorn (Glovo)

🇳🇴 How to pitch for (and win) EUR 40M from the European Innovation Council’s EIC Accelerator (Minuendo)

🇸🇪 The Local built a network of English-language daily news websites in 9 European countries, with a core team of 20 people and some 13,000 paying subscribers.

🇫🇮 How Small Giant Games got acquired by Zynga and lived to tell the tale

🇳🇴 Hackers hit Norsk Hydro with ransomware. The company responded with transparency

🇸🇪 Mackmyra, the Swedish whisky brand, wanted to see if machine learning algorithms could help them come up with new blends of whisky.

The first 100 recipes that came back were “useless” says Angela D’Orazio, Mackmyra’s master blender. They were certainly novel but included combinations that she knew wouldn’t go together. The machine seemed obsessed, for example, with adding a smoky flavour to all the blends, which D’Orazio knew would overpower all the other flavours.

Bonus

3. Interesting bets

🇪🇪 Estonia

platform focused on assisting the growth of people as self-driven learners | $1.2 million | Mistletoe Inc, angel investors
developer of a web-based software add-on focused on decreasing energy consumption of commercial properties | €350k | Lemonade Stand, Tehnohaldus, Pontos Oy

🇫🇷 France

developer of an AI platform for financial services | €14 million | Alma Mundi, AG2R LA MONDIALE, NewAlpha Asset Management, Keen Venture Partners, CapHorn
network security and automation specialist | $11 million | Jolt Capital
podcast distribution and production platform | €6 million | Idinvest Partners, Bpifrance

🇩🇪 Germany

social network which allows people to design their own social networking universe | €5.5 million
developer of augmented reality software for industrial customers | €4 million | EnBW New Ventures GmbH, Bayern Kapital GmbH, Toprope Ventures GmbH

🇮🇪 Ireland

Drone delivery company to restaurants and takeaways | $3 million | Dynamo VC

🇳🇱 Netherlands

software solution that enables deployment and management of AI algorithms throughout their lifecycle | €2 million | Global Founders Capital, BAM

🇪🇸 Spain

manufacturer of nanosatellites | €2 million | BeAble Capital, CDTI

🇸🇪 Sweden

a platform for corporate sustainability | $3.2 million | Spintop Ventures and Brightly Ventures.
online marketplace for personal video messages from famous profiles | $2.1 million | Luxor Capital, angel investors

🇨🇭 Switzerland

SaaS provider that optimizes supply chain and purchasing processes | CHF 1 million | Fly Ventures and ACE & Company

🇬🇧 UK

payable forensics software company | £3.6 million | Octopus Investments, Calculus Capital
digital business banking platform that runs on top of existing business bank accounts | $2.8 million | ADV, YC, Oriza Ventures, angel investors
deep tech software company with expertise in 3D holography | £2.4m | OSRAM Ventures, the University of Tokyo Edge Capital (UTEC), angel investors

4. Research, data, observations

🇪🇸 10 Madrid-based startups to watch (EU-Startups)

🇫🇷 Top French startups to follow in 2020 (Sifted.eu)

🇫🇷 Next 40 - 40 of France's highest performing tech startups

Every year, La French Tech and Bpifrance publish a list of 40 French startups with the strongest prospects of long-term growth based on economic performance criteria. This list comprises companies that have their head offices in France and that have not yet undergone a trade sale or floated on the stock market.

🇮🇸 The state of the Icelandic Game Industry and how it has evolved from 2009 to 2019

83 games released
turnover of $822+ million recorded over the past 10 years
more than $130m in venture capital raised by local actors
17 companies with 345 people in the game industry today

🇩🇰 The Danish game Subway Surfers is now officially the most downloaded mobile game of the decade, with 2.5Bn+ downloads

🇪🇺 Preliminary results for Europe's Most Prominent Venture Capital Investors (Dealroom)

Top Seed investors:
#1: Rocket/GFC
#2: LocalGlobe
#3: Seedcamp
#4: Point Nine Capital
#5: Hoxton Ventures

Top Series A investors:
#1: Index Ventures
#2: Accel Partners
#3: HV Ventures
#4: Idinvest
#5: Lakestar

The final ranking will be announced in early 2020.

🇪🇺 Most entrepreneurs in Europe are bootstrapping and customer acquisition & sales are their biggest challenge for the future development of the company (PWC)

🇪🇺 Fascinating data work showing how single cities such as London and Paris economies are stronger than EU countries i.e. Sweden

🇪🇺 Airbnb avoids stricter regulation in Europe as EU court rules the company does not require an estate agent license

Airbnb has secured a victory in its fight to avoid more regulation by city authorities after the European court of justice ruled that it acted as an “information society service” rather than a real estate agency.

🇪🇺 The Netherlands, consistently ranked as one of the best health care systems in the world by advanced metrics, spends a quarter of what American insurers do on hip and knee replacements.

🇩🇰 Machine learning tool helps identify suicide risk factors

Researchers have used machine learning and health data from the entire Danish population and analysed it with a machine-learning system to identify suicide risk factors. The study found that physical illness and injuries raised the risk of suicide in men, but not in women.

The study noted that Denmark has a national health care system with the entire population's clinical information compiled in government registries. Using this, Gradus and his team looked at thousands of factors in the health histories of all 14,103 individuals who died from suicide in the country from 1995 through 2015.

🇸🇪 Sweden’s central bank hired the consulting company Accenture for producing a solution as to how an e-krona could function in a test environment.

During the first year of the e-krona pilot project, a technical platform will be developed with a user interface that enables, for instance, payment with the e-krona from a mobile phone, a card and a watch. The platform will also contain simulations of payment service providers, retail outlets and other parts of the Swedish payment system.

Bonus:

Caltech scientists and engineers concluded a decade of remarkable accomplishments and research breakthroughs
What will the world look like in 2050?
This report explores four plausible future scenarios based on the intersection between our planet’s health and societal conditions.
Causes of death - Around 57 million people died in 2017. What did they die from?

5. What others think

🇬🇧 What I learned in fintech and insurtech in 2019 (Rob Moffat/Balderton)

🇫🇷 The French want Paris to be the most vibrant tech scene of Europe (Xavier Niel)

They certainly put a lot of money into it. 15 days of Parisian strikes are not really working in their favour though.

🇵🇹 Lisbon pulls in historic foreign tech investment (Sifted.eu)

Online luxury fashion platform Farfetch, coding software provider Outsystems and cloud-based contact centre Talkdesk have put Portugal on the technology map

🇪🇺 The next silicon valley won’t be in the US (QZ)

🇪🇸 Why Barcelona Is a Safe Haven for Digital Nomads (Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit)

🇩🇪 What is Germany like through the eyes of an American software developer after living in Munich for two years.

🇩🇰 Interview with Charles Madon, Partner EMEA at LEGO Ventures about what LEGO aims to achieve with a venture fund.

🇪🇺 2020 Vision: predictions from 28 big-hitters in Europe’s startup scene (Sifted.eu)

Bonus:

Here's What 950 Founders And Employees Had to Say About Running a Startup in 2019 (Firstround)
Learnings and observations emerged as a result of working at a seed firm and spending time in San Francisco (Aashay Sanghvi/Haystack)
VC Firms — How to Build an LP Base for the Long-term. (Barry Eggers/LightSpeed Ventures)
What’s the best product you discovered this year that improved your life? - thread
Don’t be backable, be real. (Charlie O’Donnell)
The Bay Area economy, illustrated (applies to most startups as labour + rent = 80% of initial expenses for any startup)

Happy Sunday!

Sunday CET will take a little break for the next weeks and return in 2020. Happy holidays!

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Created by @drnovac every Sunday. Please share it with people who may find it interesting - thanks! Feedback at dragos@nordic9.com.

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