• the American investors in Europe
• Facebook got serious about European politics
• the Dutch delisted from Nasdaq

 

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Observations

How do you know that American VCs are serious about the European market? They started flexing their PR muscles and got dedicated media space - Sequoia Capital in FT a couple of weeks ago and Lightspeed Ventures in Sifted this week.

This made me a bit curious about the as is American activity in Europe and so I dug into the data we have tracked from the past year. Here's what I found:

• out of about 7000 deals we have tracked so far for 2021, the data shows roughly 1500 American investors from 8000 active in total for the year. That's almost 1 out of 5 investors that are Americans.

• the late stage/early stage deals ratio of investors in Europe was roughly 1:3 (2600:6500), meaning that for every investor active in late stage deals on the continent, there are three who've gotten involved at early stage. (I considered late stage deals the ones closed at $10M+)

• when it comes to Americans, that ratio is almost even (750:860). One out of two Americans saw value in late stage deals - that's because i) Europe used to be an empty highway when it comes to late stage investments and ii) this is where the quick money is anyways, now that Europe can finally command a good chunk of high growth startups aspiring to deal locally rather than fleeing to US.

• let's be more specific. The ranking below is based on the number of deals made at $10M+ levels:

Bpifrance  
Accel  
Insight Venture  
Eurazeo  
Tiger Global  
SoftBank  
Index Ventures  
HV Capital  
EQT Ventures  
Balderton  

Overall, in Europe, 6 out of the top 10 are Europeans, 3 are Americans and the tenth is Softbank.

• What happens if we put the threshold to 20M+?

Insight Venture  
Accel  
SoftBank  
Tiger Global  
Bpifrance  
Eurazeo  
Index Ventures  
HV Capital  
Balderton  
EQT Ventures and Coatue with the same number of deals

• ... and at 50M+?

SoftBank  
Accel  
Tiger Global  
Insight Venture  
Eurazeo  
Index Ventures  
Coatue  
Bpifrance  
BlackRock  
Goldman Sachs  

Not too many Europeans up there, are there? The later the deals, the lower the European appetite to invest.

• Getting back to the Americans, here's the top ten active based on the number of deals closed at $10M+ in 2021:

Accel 
Insight Venture 
Tiger
Coatue
FJ Labs
General Catalyst
Goldman Sachs
BlackRock
Sequoia Capital
A16Z

• What happens at the early stage? Voila:

Accel
FJ Labs
Acequia Capital
SOSV
Headline
Village Global
Soma Capital
Sequoia Capital
TMT Investments
General Catalyst and 500 Global with the same number of deals

• oh well, in the top of the most active Americans there's one that dominates the chart straight from the top and that is Accel.

• notice Sequoia up there already, right? This year they already did 3 early stage deals, one seed and 2 series A. Lightspeed is not there yet because they just set up the office in second part of last year. And that's what the PR is for.

 

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Cheat sheet and intel reports

The most active American investors in Europe

• late stage deals (41 investors)
• early stage deals (18 investors)
• angel investors (65 investors)
• the profiles of the most visible ones in Europe (20 investors)


The hottest 160 early stage startups from Europe

We have reviewed more than 2000 early stage deals made in 2021 and profiled 160 interesting startups that are in the market raising money now:

🇬🇧 UK (40 startups)
🇩🇪 Germany (35 startups)
🇫🇷 France (30 startups)
🇸🇪 Sweden (20 startups)
🇩🇰 Denmark (15 startups)
🇫🇮 Finland (10 startups)
🇳🇴 Norway (10 startups)


What's happening in the European Fintech? 

We have launched a new intel newsletter covering the fintech in Europe - embedded, banking-as-a-service, web3 and a whole lot more. More value for the same money - it is available here and you can subscribe for getting it in your inbox from here.


Web 3 startups and investors in Europe

• Interesting web3 startups funded in Europe last fall - link
• Non-web3 investors which made at least a couple of web3 deals In Europe last year and their deals - link.


Investors in Europe from very early stages to very late stages

• pre seed/seed investors in Europe
• series A European investors
• late stage investors in Europe
• super angels active in Europe


Note: the reports are available for Nordic 9 paying customers only. You can become one from here.

 

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Fish and seafood

 

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Brits vs Yanks

 

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Watercooler talk

🇬🇧 Tell me who you hire and I'll tell you what you work on - Facebook aka Meta madeNick Clegg head of global affairs, third in the management rank, after Zuckerberg, in charge of product, and Sandberg, in charge of business. Nick Clegg is known as a politician who was the former deputy prime minister of the UK and is very familiar with the EU policy makers. That is why he is suited for the job.

🇬🇧 Britain's HM Revenue and Customs, the equivalent of the IRS in the United Kingdom, seized three NFTs and about $6,800 worth of crypto from three individuals who are currently embroiled in a $1.9 million tax fraud case.

🇳🇱 Just Eat Takeaway (JET) said last week that it would delist its shares from the Nasdaq stock exchange. The Dutch say it's too expensive for them. Meanwhile Grubhub, bought by JET for $7.3 billion last year, seems to be doing fine in US in spite of investors claims of not being a good deal.

👀 Great news for all the early stage investors out there: Tiger Global told its investors that it would no longer focus on backing large, late-stage startups preparing to go public.

🇬🇧 Amazon and Visa made peace, meaning that the Amazon customers in the UK can continue using Visa credit cards.

🇪🇺 The EU plays catch up again and takes on SpaceX and Amazon with its own €6 billion satellite internet system. I will never understand the reasoning to compete with the Americans as opposed to create sustainable value just because that's your job.

☕ The New York Stock Exchange has filed a trademark application for an NFT marketplace. Like stocks but with NFTs - such a platform would compete against the likes of OpenSea, Rarible and Nifty Gateway.

🇬🇧 Northern Ireland shows signs of growth, expansion and quietly escaping its historic restrictions - for example, there are 104 firms offering cyber security products and services in NI, employing 2,299 full-time equivalent cyber security professionals.

🇩🇪 A German thought that being a good citizen means suing a local website for not being compliant with the GDPR rules - the website included Google-Fonts-hosted font on its pages, and so it passed the IP address to Google without authorisation. The EU fined the website owner €100. 

🇸🇪 Ericsson employees may have bribed Islamic State group members to get road transports through Iraq during the period 2011-2019. That's after the 2019 episode when Ericsson paid more than $1 billion in penalties to resolve bribery and corruption investigations.

🇪🇸 Capchase, which sells financial products against SAAS revenue, hired an ex-Silicon Valley Bank senior as Head of Venture Relationships in the London office.

💰 Rising inflation may drive more families to become Airbnb hosts.

 

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Readings

 💹 The value chain of the open metaverse.

💲 Minsky moments in venture capital.

🤔 Is Google search dying?

➿ When you count users instead of dollars, the NFT world is tiny.

🌀 Are cryptocurrencies a necessary scam?

😎 This avocado armchair could be the future of AI.

 

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How's your week been?

🇬🇧 230,000 people tuned into a YouTube channel that showed planes attempting to land at London’s Heathrow Airport. That's entertainment.

🤡 The thieves from the metaverse - in Roblox they are called beamers and they get rich by stealing digital goods from children - 'I go to servers with rich idiots, then message every single one of them'.

🇩🇪 A ship carrying cars 4,000 cars, mostly Porsches and Volkswagens, from Germany to the United States caught fire in the Atlantic Ocean.

🇷🇴 Romania is home to 60% of Europe’s remaining old growth forest. Ikea is the country’s largest landowner. Logging opponents keep getting attacked and killed.

🇬🇧 Queen Elizabeth released a dog perfume that smells of 'coastal walks' and described as 'a rich, musky scent with citrus notes of bergamot'.

🧀 A group of French and Swiss cheese-makers in the area surrounding Gruyeres attempted to get the term "gruyere" trademarked in the US, based on the history of the cheese, which they said had been made in that region since sometime in the 12th century. The Americans disagreed. 

🇩🇪 German pop culture is boring, soporific, moralistic crap produced and financed by people who always aim for a common denominator in a society where morals and morality are more important than punch lines.

🤘 Paul McCartney is touring again.
 
☮️ Kanye West is exclusively releasing his next album, Donda 2, on a $200 device called a Stem Player, because he wants to free music from this oppressive system.

 

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