The most active VCs from Europe are Americans.
#2
Good morning.
Monday CET #2 here.
First of all, I am super humbled to have had so many of you already supporting Monday CET and become subscribers. From the bottom of my heart, thank you guys, I appreciate it very much!
More pressure on me now, and really excited about it! :-)
So welcome to the second edition of Monday CET! For the new subscribers, this is a new product launched two weeks ago that aims to be an intel-based newsletter covering the European private investment market.
Here’s what’s on the menu this week:
1. The European situation - who’s spent money on what in Q1
2. New funds
3. Active investors
4. Interesting deals
1. The Europe situation
As we put an end to the first trimester of 2021, I thought it would be fitting to have a detailed look at the investment deals closed in the quarter and tried to make sense about what’s happened on the European startup ecosystem.
In a nutshell:
$10 billion more spent this quarter than in the Q1 2020.
Ecommerce, financial services and SAAS are the verticals most sought after.
London still rules.
200+ investors did at least one deal a month.
300+ American investors involved in in growth and late stage deals, mostly.
Most active VCs in Europe are Americans.
Here’s a few data-based observations:
A similar number of deals and $10 billion more spent compared to last year
We tracked almost 1300 deals for Q1 2021.
It’s an average number that is close to the 1500 range from the previous years. Apart from deals which are not announced, there’s also always a delay in the data gathering process. Fwiw, Dealroom reports a similar number.
What’s more remarkable though - the dollar value is considerably higher than in previous years: $17 billion compared to about $7 billion in 2020 and $9 billion in 2019.
The continent is full of money and it looks like it is finally put to work now. Bold bets are made either, much bolder than ever before.
Ecommerce, finance and SAAS
Most of the top investments were made in ecommerce startups. Not really a surprise, ecommerce is a worldwide VC macro theme, has been for a while, and today stands at about 16% of the total retail sales worldwide, accentuated by Covid this year.
In Europe we have two ecommerce subplots:
Grocery delivery
5 out of 10 largest deals in Q1 are grocery delivery operations.
The cut of the lion was taken by Wolt and Glovo, established players in the food delivery business, at a later investment stage and looking for new growth sources in the grocery segment.
They are joined by a new range of plain vanilla emerging incumbents, looking to take as much market share as possible from the grocery delivery business. Gorillas, Rohlik and Getir are top contenders.
Amazon SKU aggregators
This is the other emergent category that took off rapidly in the past 9 months in Europe, and was reflected by some larger deals closed in Q1.
The Stryze Group and SellerX from Germany, Branded from France and Heroes from the UK are notable startups which raised large amounts of money.
Other than that - money was spent in financial services, with Klarna’s mega deal of $1bn, followed by Checkout.com, Starling Bank and Rapyd - all involved in capital raisings larger than $300 million in the first quarter of the year.
SAAS presents significant investment interest as well since software eats the world, right. Putting aside UiPath from Romania which really is an American company now - we have the Swiss from Nexthink and OutSystem coming from Portugal as top deals in the quarter, followed by three German companies - Staffbase, Mambu and Personio - and the French from Payfit.
London still rules
There’s three main startup hubs in Europe right now: UK, DACH and the Nordics, all with a somewhat even deal number distribution in the quarter (a little under 300). France is the fourth next hub with about 180 deals.
For the moment, it looks like Brexit didn’t impact as much the investment activity, as London leads by far in terms of cities where deals are closed, with almost as many transactions (180) as the following two cities combined Berlin (111) and Paris (100).
Active investors
We tracked 1278 active investors - this includes everybody who participated in at least one capital fundraise for a minority equity stake - VCs, angels, corporate investors etc.
15% of them (216 investors) were active in at least 3 deals in the quarter - that means they did at least one deal a month.
We screened all of those and looked at the VC-only activity - 60 VC funds were involved in 5 deals or more, with the following distribution:
10+ deals: 7
9 deals: 4
8 deals: 7
7 deals: 8
6 deals: 13
5 deals: 21
So more than half (39) of the VCs with 5+ deals did 2 deals or more per month.
Those are the heavy users in our dataset of 1278 items. :-)
We did the country distribution of those 60 VCs:
🇺🇸 USA - 14 companies
🇩🇪 Germany - 12 companies
🇬🇧 UK - 12
🇫🇷 France - 7
🇨🇭 Switzerland - 3
🇩🇰 Denmark - 2
🇸🇪 Sweden - 2
Austria, Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, Russia and Spain, each with 1 VC involved in 3 deals or more in the first three months of 2021.
Americans are coming, right?
The Americans
We analysed a bit the activity of the American investors in Europe in the first three months of 2021.
We tracked more than 300 investors active in Europe, which is about the same number as the investors active in France (311 in US vs 328 in France). As a benchmark, UK, DACH and the Nordics are at a 500+ number active investors.
It is super interesting, as out of those 300 investors, very few of them have actually physical presence in Europe, and they are at the same level of activity with France, which is one of the largest European countries.
But who-who-who are those American investors, I hear you asking. Top five is:
Accel - 9 deals
FJ Labs - 9 deals
Insight Venture Partners - 8 deals
e.ventures - 8 deals
General Catalyst - 7 deals
Lightspeed Venture Partners - 7 deals
Techstars - 7 deals (non accelerator transactions)
5 out of 6 are established in Europe already.
Accel has had a dedicated team and fund for Europe for many years. FJ Labs’ Fabrice Grinda is French and spends a lot of time in Europe and e.ventures technically is a German company that operated in US for a long time and lately started to get involved more in the motherland.
General Catalyst hired an European coordinator back in January and Lightspeed just hired Paul Murphy from Northzone, who is yet to start. Insight has nada in Europe, but has Teddie Wardi (formerly with Dawn and Atomico in London) in New York.
Techstars deals are follow-ons done via their London office.
The next 4:
GV - 6 deals
Plug and Play - 6 deals (non-accelerator transactions)
Left Lane Capital - 5 deals
Sequoia Capital - 4 deals
Oh, there’s non-VC American investors who were quite active as well:
Tiger Global Management - 12 deals
Coatue - 8 deals
Luxor Capital + Lugard Road Capital - 6 deals
Always a question whether to consider Tiger a VC or a private equity company, after all it is the largest investment house in the world. I stick with private equity as it has a larger connotation - in Europe they do late stage VC deals. Coatue and Luxor are hedge funds, and Lugard is a dedicated fund owned by Luxor.
We also did a portfolio analysis of 15 of the most active American investors in Europe in the quarter.
As expected, the majority of their investments is in growth (33) and late stage deals (28) - some of them are the usual suspects: Hopin, Getir, Sorare, Gorillas, Zapp etc.
9 early stage bets are there too - largest deal at this stage is Nothing.
This is what caught my attention - there is a whole lot more to chew and analyse properly. This data is extracted from several dedicated reports we did over at Nordic 9 covering the Q1 2021 data.
💸 Active investors this week:
Below is a list of investors active in deals from Europe in the last 30 days.
Venture companies
🇸🇪 Creandum
🇬🇧 Balderton
🇫🇷 Supernova Invest
🇬🇧 2150 vc
Angels:
🇩🇪 Andreas Bechtolsheim
🇪🇸 Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas
🇬🇧 Terry Leahy
🇩🇪 Max Tayenthal
❄️ New funds
🇫🇷 Axa
🇬🇧 Index Origin
🇫🇷 Singular VC
🇨🇿 Kaya VC
🇵🇹 Shilling
🔥 Interesting deals
This is a list of interesting startups involved in deals announced in the past weeks.
🇨🇭 Angle Audio
verticals: audio social network
HQ: Zurich
founded: 2020
investors: Atlantic Labs
raised: N/A
Angle Audio calls itself the Swiss ClubHouse, founded by CEO Matthias D. Strodtkoetter, Valerius Huonder and Matthias Karg. Angle developed a social audio platform for consumers and says it’s different from Clubhouse as there’s no stages, and everybody can contribute to the conversations.
vertical: alternative fish meat producer
HQ: Berlin
founded: 2020
investors: Manta Ray, Norrsken VC Lever VC
raised: €7 million
Bluu Bioscience, founded by CEO Sebastian Rakers and Simon Fabich, is working for the development of cell-based cultivated fish, with a focus on salmon, trout and carp. The company is still in R&D mode, and is expecting to have a prototype product out by the end of 2022.
🇬🇧 Zelt
vertical: HR SAAS
HQ: London
founded: 2020
investors: Lakestar, Village Global
raised: $1 million
Zelt, founded by Chris Priebe and Riccardo Bruni, develops HR SAAS that aims to become an end-to-end backoffice platform designed for the modern company.
🇫🇮 Kamupak
vertical: manufacturer of disposable packages for horeca
HQ: Helsinki
founded: 2018
investors: N/A
Kamupak, founded by CEO Iida Miettinen and Karri Lehtonen, produces disposable packages for the horeca business, used as a circular takeaway solution for grocery stores and restaurants.
The business works by offering a digital deposit system for reusable packaging, with the aim of replacing single-use take away packaging with reusables.
🇬🇧 Yoppie
verticals: D2C producer of personalised menstrual care solutions.
HQ: London
founded: 2018
investors: N/A
raised: $4.5M
Yoppie, founded by CEO Daniella Peri, initially started the development of just one product - a 100% organic cotton tampon - and quickly expanded to offer pads and liners.
The company now has built a DTC subscription-based op providing organic period care and PMS solutions and using smart tech to enable women to not only customise and manage their menstrual care, but also to better educate themselves while they do it.
🇩🇪 Airbank
verticals: multi-banking B2B SAAS
HQ: Berlin
founded: 2020
investors: EF, Speedinvest
raised: N/A
Airbank was incubated at Entrepreneur First in Berlin by CEO Christopher Zemina (former Speedinvest employeee) and Patrick de Castro Neuhaus and is developing a multi-banking software management tool for companies.
The company is taking advantage of the EU's PSD2 directive that allows any licensed third-party service provider to view transaction data upon user consent and is building a business banking platform for finance teams that aggregates all the bank accounts in one place to provide a unified banking experience.
🇬🇧 Modernbanc
verticals: white label SAAS for launching banking products
HQ: London
founded: 2020
investors: GFC, angels
Modernbanc, founded in 2020 by Gregory Gevorkyan, works for building a solution helping companies to launch accounts, cards and loan products quickly via an API service. They’re still in a pre-launch stage.
Also notable:
2 of the European startups from Y Combinator W21 announced raising money:
🇬🇧Anima: $2.5 million - Hummingbird Ventures
🇪🇸 Abacum: $7 million - PROFounders, K-Fund, Creandum
Thanks for your support 🙌
You just read the second edition of Monday CET - an intel-based newsletter covering the European private investment market.
My objective is to research, understand, and explain the fast-changing Euro startup ecosystem, and bring to attention interesting and innovative businesses and practices.
This email aims to provide a cogent picture with my weekly findings.
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