we have a look at the European geographical portfolios of two American investors + 8 fresh funds announced to deploy money in Europe's startups + a batch of early stage interesting startups

 

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Cheat sheet data

• 19 out of 26 deals Northzone was involved in the last 5 quarters are *not* from the Nordics.

• FJ Labs, which is one of the most active early stage investors in Europe (inc-ed in US and run by a French guy), has a quite geo-balanced portfolio. Here's the country breakdown of the 27 deals we tracked in the last 5 quarters:
🇪🇸 Spain - 7 deals
🇬🇧 UK - 5 deals
🇩🇪 Germany - 4 deals
🇳🇱 Netherlands - 3 deals
🇦🇹 Austria - 2 deals
🇸🇪 Sweden - 2 deals
🇱🇹 Lithuania, 🇧🇪 Belgium, 🇮🇪 Ireland, 🇬🇷 Greece - 1 deal each

 

• 9 out of 15 investments made in Europe in last year by Luxor Capital and its sister fund Lugard Road are from the Nordics: 
🇳🇴 24SevenOffice, Attensi, House of Control, Play Magnus, Mercell, Tise
🇩🇰 Ageras
🇸🇪 inRiver, Volta Trucks

 

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Active investors

🇳🇱 Prosus Ventures
🇬🇧 Blossom Capital
🇩🇪 Friends2Grow
🇫🇷 Xavier Niel
🇬🇧 Jonathan Seaton
🇩🇪 Verena Pausder

🇸🇪 EQT closed EQT IX fund at a hard cap of €15.6bn
🇨🇭 Endeavour Vision closed a $375 million fund to back medtech and digital health .
🇫🇷 Vista Investors and Reed Capital are merging to form EIM Capital.
🇩🇪 Cusp Capital announced the first closing of its first fund at €200 million out of Essen.
🇫🇮 Icebreaker announced the closing of two new funds.
🇵🇱 Inovo announced the final close of its second fund at €54m. 
🇨🇭 Lightbird Ventures is a new early-stage VC firm backing Swiss & European tech entrepreneurs.
🇫🇮 Virta announced signing off its second fund.

 

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Interesting startups

🇬🇧 The Engineering Company
verticals: SAAS, manufacturing
HQ: London
founded: 2017
investors: Seedcamp, Kima Ventures, angels

The Engineering Company, founded by Parikshat Singh, developed a software framework for design of industrial hardware.

🇩🇪 Deepset
verticals: SAAS
HQ: Berlin
founded: 2018
investors: System One, Lunar Venture, angels
raised: $1.6 million

Deepset, founded by Malte Pietsch, Milos Rusic and Timo Möller, is a deep tech developer and built an open-source software enabling developers to use the latest language models & transfer learning techniques for their individual tasks.

They have paying customers from selling enterprise versions & services for helping companies build, run and maintain production-ready NLP applications.

🇫🇷 Rosaly
verticals: SAAS, financial services
HQ: Paris
founded: 2019
investors: N/A

Rosaly, founded by Arbia Smiti, developed a B2B software tool that acts as an on-demand payroll payment system, accompanied by a financial education system.

The latter is an interesting sales hook.

🇳🇴 Fauna
verticals: ecommerce, social resposibility
HQ: Oslo
founded: 2020
investors: angels
raised: $290k

Fauna is a mobile app helping consumers keep track of so-called eco or green products by a point-based system.

If they add an interactive social mechanism on top of it, it has huge scalability potential.

🇬🇧 Hofy
vertical: SAAS
HQ: London
founded: 2020
investors: Kindred Ventures, TrueSight, angels.

Hofy, founded by Michael Ginzo and Sami Bouremoum, develops a software solution helping teams manage the work from home (WFH) process.

Riding the WFH wave with and simple and efficient onboarding SAAS.

🇬🇧 Decorte Future Industries (DFI)
vertical: smart wearables
HQ: Cambridge
founded: 2019
investors: angel investors
raised: $585k

DFI, founded by Roeland P.-J. E. Decorte, produces wearables that provide real-time, 24/7 measurements of the users’ vitals as they are easy to attach to any piece of clothing.

Their initial business case was army contractors and pivoted to healthcare for preventative or predictive health tracking within the care centres, with a basic remote detection of Covid-19 among the vulnerable and elderly.

🇸🇪 Lassie
vertical: financial services
HQ: Stockholm
founded: 2020
investors: DHS

Lassie, founded by Hedda Båverud Olsson, Sophie Wilkinson and Johan Jönsson, sells digital on-demand insurance products for pet owners.

D2C insurance + pet markets = an intersection of a few markets that are growing double digits.

 

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