Hello and welcome to edition #235 of Sunday CET! That’s a lot of emails over a lot of weeks - thanks for reading and keeping this a conversation. ❤️ 

This one I made it a fun thought exercise about who is going to be the next lead of Europe’s most promising tech startup ever, and also had a look at seed to series A graduation rates - yup, numbers show that the European market is in a pretty bad shape, if anybody needed any confirmation.

Hit reply and tell me what you think. Enjoy, Dragos

Market talk

Lovable’s A

For those living under a rock, Lovable is a software startup in Sweden making a business out of a framework used to build full-stack applications using natural language prompts. It’s probably one of the hotter startups in Europe, because of its fast traction - launched in 2023 as an open project, at the end of last year reached 15M ARR and already passed the 60M, based on what co-founder Anton is saying. And still growing like crazy - it's indeed a pace that’s never been heard of in Europe, comparable only to the hot AI startups from US.

Now, the usual questions apply - will this stick? Is it a one time wonder or we’ve got a sustainable trajectory? How defensible is it against both competitors and big boys in the game, which btw kill waves of VC-funded startups with every 3 months product iterations?

On a quick look from outside - it seems like we have a good one. A few reasons: exceptional retention, customers incentive to stay - they build revenue-generating apps and relative low CAC (I assume) because of their viral expansion loops. Add to that the intangibles - i.e. culture, team values, mission-driven, which seem healthy at least from social media and anecdotes. Those are as strong reasons as any for making Lovable a sustainable gig on the long run if it can i) maintain low churn beyond the first few renewals, ii) manage AI-inference costs effectively, and iii) defend against an accelerating competitive landscape - and regulatory btw, we’re in Europe, remember?

And this, of course, makes Lovable for a very high desirability among investors dealing in Europe. After all, the Swedish startup is the best Europe has produced in a while, aligned with the likes of Mistral and Helsing.

However, it is not priced as such, at least not yet. It’s also true that Lovable doesn’t really need money, which makes for a strong leverage - btw, a rare privilege startup founders from Europe have when asking money from investors. But the market sentiment is palpably strong for Lovable and investors are circling around, in spite of the high entry costs just to be able to be part of the conversation.

So it’s a matter of when, not if - and when that time comes, who is going to be part of Lovable’s A round? And who is going to lead? The market is full of rumours, of course - I tried to put those away and made a candidates list for lead investors:

• Creandum - top of the list only because they’ve gotten already in the captable with a post-seed and they are series A investors. However, it’s highly unlikely they will lead this one - they’ve done their fund-returning work already.

• Sequoia - definitely a strong contender, if only because they’re not in Mistral and Helsing. They’re among the best in the world at what they do, and the London office has the rep of being strong-principled and avoiding bidding wars. Which makes for an interesting case, because this is a beauty contest. Worth noting that they just up-marked one of Creandum’s portcos.

• General Catalyst - another strong candidate, GC is arguably the most dominant investor in Europe, an offensive started by acquiring La Famiglia 20 months ago. They’re in all of the most valuable startup assets Europe has produced lately and no price is too high if the prize is worth it because they have the muscle to back that up - raised 8B last year, half of which for early stage only.

• Lightspeed - definitely have the chops to do it though they’ve been a bit quiet lately. Well, not that quiet - they’ve had Granola to the B, chipped in Helsing’s B and led Neko’s B this winter after all, and those are not deals easy to get into. They also have the merit of having led Mistral’s seed and got into Helsing’s C - so yeah, on paper at least Lightspeed’s odds of leading this deal are as good as any.

• Andreessen Horowitz - the fourth leg of this puzzle. In spite of closing down their London office, they have aggressively compensated with a scout network in Europe, even poached a few from competition. But this requires heavy lifting beyond marginal scout work and afaik the Americans had already tried to get into Lovable before even Creandum did, to no luck. Let me put it this way - if a16z is not in this deal, it will be a big miss because their business model requires indexing whatever is hot, no matter how expensive it is. They just gotta.

• Northzone - strong Nordic bond here and we had to have one European on the list 😀 - though it is hard to see them compete head-to-head with the Americans for the lead. But Nordic people usually have a strong connection and besides, Northzone and Creandum go all the way back to Spotify’s series A from 2008.

Those are the usual suspects for the lead - and even though none of those are usually second banana, other allocation names could include Accel (got late into Helsing and did H at seed), Index (not their style though), EQT and Atomico (Nordic vibes), Insight (Teddie), DST and Iconiq (strong Euro portfolio) or Softbank (very into AI).

Am I missing anyone, what do you guys think? Click below for your A lead option:

Seed to series A

This week, I have pulled out our Nordic9 data and reviewed the most promising seed assets funded by VCs in 2023 and 2024 in order to see which one was up-marked post their early stage backing.

From those, I found less than 50 startups that have graduated from seed to series A since 2023. Four of them - Legora, Mistral, Filigran and Apron - have also raised series B.

The 2023-2024 seed universe is roughly 10k startups in Europe, which indicate that the graduation percentages are very small numbers, also given that usually a B2B SAAS often raises within 12-18 months from seed, while deep tech or biotech take longer - 24-36 months.

So what’s going on? A few explanations:

• bad macro - we're in a worldwide economic recession even though the numbers may say otherwise, which makes for a more difficult PMF validation environment, all while the competition at the top is insane, especially in AI-anything verticals.

• investors are struggling - if you take a step back, you will notice that the deals done today are concentrated in the hands of just a handful of investors. A bunch of them are ghosting the market because no liquidity, while the others are much more wary, pushed the funding KPIs eligibility way higher than usual while focusing more on portfolio.

• good foundational work takes a lot of time - you cannot rush into things in spite of the VC excitement of up-marking their assets asap. Besides, the good startups have already fled to US post-seed and the local visibility disappears, Europe is just a plan B scenario. All while the local ones either don’t announce bridges/secondaries and/or simply struggle to grow as expected.

• startups are struggling - it’s the elephant in the room, nobody talks about the startup market facing an adverse environment, many went under or cannot make ends meet.

• pricing disconnect - there’s a divide between expensive AI assets in US + the metoo wave, and this creates a bit of unrealistic expectation when it comes to correlating to Europe.

Two more additional numbers for a better context:

• in 2024, we've tracked 195 series A transactions closed at minimum $10 million

• in 2023, we've tracked 247 such transactions.

Therefore the 50 from above represents only 10% of all those 2023-2024 series As transactions - you can find all those names in a handy cheat sheet, available for our customers. Become one now!

Signals

Interesting deals

🇩🇰 Blinktroll (robot used for soldier training) - pre-seed
🇩🇪 Atmen (green certification SAAS) - seed
🇬🇧 Samphire Neuroscience​ (brain-stimulating wearable for menstrual pains) - seed
🇪🇸 Voltrac (autonomous tractor manufacturer) - seed
🇮🇪 Solidroad (AI for sales coaching) - seed

• we add more of those on Linkedin.

What would you invest in?

I have picked three early stage, seed level startups from Europe with intriguing odds for growing. You're the VC - who gets your term sheet?

Last week’s results:

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🇩🇪 Autarc (Berlin) - SAAS heat pumps sales 25% Votes
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🇬🇧 Didimi (London) - B2b construction marketplace 27% Votes
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🇸🇪 IntuiCell (Stockholm) - 'Brain Intelligence' 48% Votes

Let’s see your say this week - click on the link of your choice below - we’ll add the result next week

What is important in European startups

This week’s lineup:

• Sequoia invested in a British company valued at 1 billion - it was a steal! Why, what’s their strategy play and where is the upside?

• there’s a newly announced defence VC fund in Europe - who’s behind it besides a bunch of ex-Prime Ministers, and a look at their first deal from Estonia.

• zoom in onto the pricing vs value proposition of preventative health startups - and what makes the vertical hot?

• we’ve had fund returner exit this week, ladies and gents - yup, in Europe from all places.

• a multistage drastically braking off early stage, couple of newly announced funds at the intersection of VC and PE as well as two others that are fully invested already.

All these and a bunch more detailed in tomorrow’s intel, which is fairly comprehensive every week - try it out for free.

Other notes

🇬🇧 London-listed fintech group Wise, which is worth $15.5B, has announced this week its intention to move and re-list on NYSE in a potential blow to the UK public markets. Not a singular effort though re-listing doesn’t always equal a valuation bump - alas solid investor interest and good valuations are rarities on this side of the ocean.

🇸🇪 The Swedish fast-fashion retailer H&M, which is worth $10B, is steadily moving back toward private ownership - been listed on the Swedish stock market since 1974.

🇪🇺 The European Central Bank cut interest rates to 2%, its lowest level in more than two years and the eighth cut in the past year.

🇪🇺 The EU fined Delivery Hero and Glovo €329 million for running a cartel that divvied up areas and agreed not to poach each other’s employees.

🇪🇺 Apple challenges 'unreasonable' EU order to open up to rivals - the legal fight will likely take years to play out in court. Until then, Apple will have to comply with the EU order and wait for Trump to negotiate how big tech should respect the European legislation.

🇫🇷 French AI: Mistral AI releases a vibe coding client + H Company reveals three new AI agents

🇬🇧 The Deel/Rippling corporate espionage scandal gets ugly by week.

✍️ Vinod Khosla himself with an hour masterclass on pitching and storytelling (he is 70).

🤷 You know the European investment ecosystem is in a bad shape when investors have nothing better to do than opining about how much founders should work. Maybe they’ll do punch cards for their portcos next.

💲 The current situation in startup valuations:

🇺🇸 In other news that surprised no-one, Elon Musk and Trump’s bromance is over and the divorce is ugly - key question here is how this will impact the tech ecosystem, given that a bunch of VC/tech bros followed Musk in supporting the president. The markets seem to have rebounded after the spring nervousness and everybody seems to be content with the fact that there’s nothing Trump can do to avoid having the American economy heading into a bad economic recession.

💲 Samsung did a deal to preload Perplexity’s AI tools, a move that not only challenges Google’s dominance but could complicate Apple’s own flirtation with the startup.

☕ A conversation with Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe.

🤖 2025 global private markets report by McK.

🧑‍🎓 AI eats the world, per Benedict Evans.

⚙️ Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wants to build the everything app.

🫢 Mongolia PM resigns after son's luxury holiday stirs public fury.

🏃‍♂️ Nintendo has sold out of the Switch 2 console at launch.

🙈 Gen Z went into sex work as a shortcut to the American dream. Those days are gone.

🇸🇪 Sweden rents prison space in Estonia.

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

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