The one with three Spanish exits and Euro entrepreneurs
#52
Hello from foggy Stockholm and welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET.
Here’s what caught my attention this week. Enjoy!
Euro strat
Powder:
🇩🇪 EMH
🇩🇪 TVM
🇨🇭 UBS
🇪🇸 Telefónica Tech Ventures
🇩🇪 HV Capital
🇮🇱 Aristagora
🇩🇰 Preseed Ventures
🇬🇧 Air Street Capital
🇮🇱 VentureIsrael
Highlights:
🇫🇮 Kodit raises €100M for a real estate fund on top of an AI-based platform.
🇳🇴 Cognite backed by Accel in a $75 mil deal
🇬🇧 LabGenius extends series A to $25M
🇳🇱 CodeSandbox raises $12.7 million
Bets:
🇩🇪 provider of IoT-networks for tenement buildings
🇸🇪 SAAS for strategic plans and governance models
🇨🇭 SAAS for inspection analysis of sewer pipelines
🇧🇪 SAAS for location positioning
🇪🇸 car-as-a-service provider
🇩🇰 manufacturer of products out of coffee waste
🇩🇰 operator of co-living spaces
🇪🇸 Kibo and Caixa in an Apple exit
🇪🇸 Balderton, Nauta and Vulcan Capital in another Spanish exit
🇪🇸 And yet another one - 360 Cap, Draper B1, Faraday etc exited from Signaturit.
🇸🇪 GP Bullhound et al exited from a Swedish developer of a Linkedin for healthcare.
Other stuff:
🇪🇸 Glovo was valued at €1bn+ in a secondary transaction made earlier this year.
🇩🇪 BMW and Daimler sold the B2B and B2G side of their mobility-as-a-service businesses to Mobimeo, the German national rail service Deutsche Bahn subsidiary. Uber is apparently interested in taking over the ride-hailing and micromobility-sharing service FreeNow.
🇸🇪 Klarna acq-hired a company doing consumer tech for post-purchase price monitoring, which is one of the things Honey is also doing, on top of the coupons business. Honey was acquired by PayPal for $4 billion last year.
Yep, the Klarna-PayPal war is on, had quite a few folks reaching out and adding onto last week’s observations.
🇳🇴 This startup from Norway has been growing up like crazy since summer.
🇪🇺 Sequoia opened shop in London this summer, led by a Romanian. One of the first things they set up? A VC scouting program. This is how it’s done, folks!
Euro insights
🇸🇪 In Sweden data shows that the number of entrepreneurs with a foreign background increased by as much as 224 percent, compared with an increase of 76 percent among the rest of the population.
The explanation: immigrants have a hard time to find a job in Sweden.
🇸🇪 A paywalled article written by a young Brit very high on Sweden and entrepreneurship after talking to the likes of Niklas Zennström and Sweden's business minister, and genuinely closing his arguments with “there was nothing programmed on the Sweden’s governmental side, it just happened.” That’s it, that’s the article.
Fact is that in order to get what it means to build something from scratch you need to talk to the little guys. Or do it yourself. Besides, being a tech entrepreneur, either in Sweden or elsewhere in Europe, is still regarded by the society as an exotic, risky thing. It’s a niche. And the guys who made it are remarkable because they were successful in spite of an European ecosystem still not friendly with (tech) founders.
Things have changed a lot lately and we have come a long way, it is true, but dreaming with the eyes opens (like the French do) that Europe will produce tech value at par with Silicon Valley - it is not going to happen very soon. And no, it is not a money problem.
🇪🇺 And speaking of entrepreneurship in Europe, the biggest Euro investor (the European Commision) wanted a reality check of the return of their investments in the ecosystem.
The gig resulted in a nice, warm feeling generating report highlighting the value of European tech companies to some €618 billion, 4X from 5 years ago.
While the yoy delta seems promising, the absolute number means nothing as
a) “sum of the valuations of all startups in the ecosystem founded after 2000” is an amalgam of private and public companies traded on the American stock exchange.
b) due to Europe’s exit liquidity problems, most of the money from the private companies will be cashed out likely in the US as well. That is why founders sell “too early” in Europe.
c) the non-Euro ownership in those companies composing the index is important but not mentioned.
d) we don’t know how much the EU spent for achieving that number.
I get it, it’s difficult to put a value on an ecosystem but there’s too many variables that can distort considerably the result of a simple exercise for proving a point.
Other than that, the report is full of interesting trivia and, all in all, it makes for a good PR exercise, you would think that Europe is full of tech entrepreneurs. Far from that. :D
Otoh, for every startup that is in databases like Dealroom, there’s at least 3 or 4 not accounted for. That could be a restaurant, or service shop, a manufacturer or my 20 years old neighbor cashing in $100k+ per year from gaming coaching (he’s hiring!). And yes, they use tech too as tech is pervasive in 2020 and yes, they are also entrepreneurs but those guys are not VC investable, and hence outside the scope of the analysis.
🇮🇸 Good interview with David Helgason, Unity’s founder and one of the super angels from Europe.
🇸🇪 The most exciting animal-free seafood startups
🇪🇺 The most interesting DTC startups from the Nordics
🇫🇷 Benchmarking the Pricing Strategy of 100+ Subscription Based Mobile Apps
🇪🇺 The Top Female Founder in Each Country
Euro bits
🇩🇪 How do you know Germany is finally serious about startups? They’re looking to change legislation. As far as I know Germany has one of the most un-friendly startup and investors legislation in Europe.
🇸🇪 Amazon launched its operations in Sweden and the local media killed them for the lack of accuracy of translating the description of 150 million items, for which Amazon used automated translation.
They’ll fix it along the way and a PR problem which has nothing to do with Amazon’s core business, reflecting rather the NIH syndrome prevalent in small, closed communities such as Sweden.
🇫🇷 The French can be happy now:
London’s Heathrow Airport says it has lost its place as Europe’s busiest air hub to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris after the COVID-19 pandemic grounded flights and Britain failed to approve passenger testing that could scale back quarantine requirements.
🇬🇧 BuzzFeed UK Group, which includes Germany, Japan, Mexico, and India, had £4.6M in 2019 revenue, down 31% YoY, and losses of £7.4M, down 17%, before its closure.
Meanwhile, the mother company expects to breakeven this year at $300M. They cut costs with $80 million in 2 years.
🇩🇰 Stripe moves payment processing to Dublin due to Brexit
🇫🇮 In Finland, a private company providing psychotherapy got hacked and their customers received emails with a demand for €200 in bitcoin to prevent the contents of their discussions with therapists being made public.
Quite bad as victims were underage too. As serious as a governmental crisis meeting over the weekend - CEO was fired as apparently there was another breach a year ago which he covered up.
🇸🇪 There’s more - in Sweden there’s another company that was hacked, this time for data about bank vaults, alarm systems and sensitive facilities from banks and state institutions.
🇮🇹 Italian regulators investigate Google over advertising market abuse.
🇳🇱 The Dutch Govt has passed a motion moving the nation toward 30 km/h as the norm for all streets in built-up areas. Once passed into law, cities would have to argue why certain streets should have a higher speed limit instead of the other way around.
Graph of the week
Spotify:
Reads
Reid Hoffman interviewing Caterina Fake
Netflix is testing an audio-only mode to compete with podcasts and audiobooks
Nearly half of Google’s search traffic now comes from Apple devices. The acquisition cost: an estimated $8 - $12 billion in annual payments, up from $1 billion a year in 2014. That is 20% of Apple’s annual profits.
Harley-Davidson unveils a gorgeous new electric bike called Serial 1
Happy Sunday!
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