There's three types of seed investors + we have a detailed look at the family offices from Sweden.

Investors

Active this week

🇬🇧 Fuel Ventures
🇨🇦 Omers Ventures
🇫🇷 XAnge
🇪🇸 K Fund
🇸🇪 Luminar Ventures
🇫🇷 Quantonation
🇮🇹 Eduardo Ronzano
🇪🇸 Francisco Riberas

Fresh powder

🇬🇧 Permira aims to raise some $2.5 billion for its second growth fund focused on investments in smaller, growing technology companies

🇬🇧 Balderton launched a $680 million early growth fund looking to invest between $25m and $50m in 15 companies through both primary and secondary investments.

🇬🇧 DN Capital has raised more than €200 million for its latest vehicle, Global Venture Capital V

🇪🇸 Alantra announced a first close with more than €80 million of commitments in their Klima Energy Transition Fund.

🇬🇧 Salonica Maroon launched a new £75 million fund aimed at tackling the diversity problem. 

🇬🇧 Fuel Ventures announces £45 million fund for early-stage and pre-seed startups.

Notable

🇺🇸 Remember last week mentioning Insight Partners being on the list of high profile investors not involved in the grocery investment frenzy from Europe? 

Not anymore, this week they announced backing The Modern Milkman.

🇬🇧 This week two other YC alumni (winter 21) announced funding deals, both from Britain:

- Cord raised $4.4 million from CRV.
It developed a suite of powerful tools allowing for seamless collaboration across roles and teams, from domain-expert annotators to project managers and machine learning engineers 
 
- Terra raised $2.8 million from General Catalyst, Samsung and Next Ventures.
It built an API solution that makes it easy for developers to access fitness and health data from wearables and sensors. 

🇪🇸 Cooltra from Spain raised a nice €50 million, part debt conversion from existing investors, and part to accommodate in the captable a local angel involved in an auto-parts manufacturer.

Cooltra is one of the main rental operators of bikes, scooters and motorbikes in Spain and Italy.

🇸🇪 Yesterday I mentioned Northvolt and H2 Green Steel as two big, vision driven projects emerging from Sweden.

It's interesting to note that both of them have had the seeds raised from, more or less, the same investors from Sweden - namely a few influent local family offices.

Here is the list:
- Vargas Holding + Altor Funds (both controlled by Harald Mix, one of the main dealmakers in the country)
- FAM (Wallenberg family - half joke, half truth, it's said that they control most of Sweden's economy)
- IMAS Foundation (sister foundation to the INGKA Foundation - IKEA owners)
- Stena Group (Olsson family - controlling another large corporate group in Sweden)
- Cristina Stenbeck (Stenbeck family - controlling Kinnevik, among others)

Add to the list Daniel Ek, probably via Prima Materia - he is the only self-made guy from the list as he made his wealth by building Spotify.

We actually did a guide profiling a number of the family offices from Sweden, which you can read here.

️ There's three types of seed investors: 

- the ones that look in high detail at a founder's profile - the character of an entrepreneur, the descriptions, the articulation, the strengths, the weaknesses, you would have thought she’d spent 300 hours doing the psychological profile. It's sort of like those TV shows, when you have someone profile the serial killer in like 30 seconds.

- the ones that follow a disciplined thesis based on fundamentals - they almost ignore the person as the founder and is all about the structural economics of the business, the market power, that ability to capture value.

- and there's the ones that just steal the meal of other investors - a third type, which almost doesn't think about the underlying company. What they actually watch is other investors and sort of like a pack of lions, they don't try and kill the antelope. They just wait and swoop in and win deals that they saw other good investors go for.

This is from a gem of a podcast with one of the more active angel investors of Europe, Charlie Songhurst, highly recommended.

Interesting deals this week

🇬🇧 Opportuni
verticals: B2B SAAS
HQ: London
founded: 2020
investors: Fuel Ventures

Opportuni, founded by Bill MacGregor and CEO Tim Ward, developed a software platform available as a subscription service that lets firms in any sector and of any size match with government contracts. The platform bundles tools that use machine learning for providing appropriate public tender matches for businesses capabilities.

Opportuni just raised $1.4 million this week.


🇫🇷 Claap
vertical: video SAAS
HQ: Paris
founded: 2021
investors: LocalGlobe, Headline
raised: $3M

Claap, founded by Pierre Touzeau and Robin Bonduelle, developed a software tool that can be used for managing asynchronous meetings. The solution helps users share updates, get feedback and solve problems without the need to be in the same room, at the same time.

It's a good positioning in a lucrative market.

Claap just raised $3 million in seed from LocalGlobe and an American investor. 

🇩🇪 Priceloop
vertical: SAAS
HQ: Berlin
founded: 2020
investors: Project A

Priceloop, founded by CEO Richard Schwenke (formerly with Contorion) and Dat Tran, developed a software tool that helps with data-driven pricing decisions used to impact or predict revenue for retail & e-commerce companies.

They just raised this week.

🇬🇧 Hibana
verticals: D2C ecommerce
HQ: London
founded: 2020
investors: Fuel Ventures
raised: $160k

Hibana, founded by Peter Dakin and Nick O'Quinn, is building a marketplace for a collection of products made by designers, creators, movers and makers behind the UK's most inspiring and forward-thinking brands. 

Hibana just got pre-seeded this week.

🇫🇷 HappyPal
vertical: SAAS
HQ: Paris 
founded: 2019
investors: Anthemis
raised: $2.4 million.

HappyPal, founded by Alyssa Emmungil and Rim Zerhouni, developed a SaaS and payment solution for the employee benefit market as it is replacing paper gift vouchers with a new kind of credit card for all employee allowances.

They raised $2.4 million in seed from Anthemis.

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