Hey there - welcome to Sunday CET!

Spring is finally here, honoured properly by a lil’ break - most people took a few days off due to May 1st celebrated across Europe, bank holiday in the UK tomorrow and Ortodox Easter in most of the Eastern European countries. A good pretext for me to catch up on NBA, which has one of the more competitive playoffs ever. Also a close eye on Malmö this coming week, which expects 100k visitors for a town of 350k hosting the Eurovision festival. For those living under a rock, it’s a fun European music contest, attracting more viewers than the Super Bowl in the US, and which sadly is politically charged this year - Sweden is on terror level four and brought in police help from Norway and Denmark.

Anyways - let’s get to business. Thanks for reading and let me know what you make of it.

Dragos

Intel

Early stage investors in Europe

Last year, over at Nordic 9 we’ve tracked the startup transactions done by about 10,000 investors in Europe. This morning I was curious to have a look at who were the more active ones at early stage levels - i.e. closed deal rounds at less than 10 million. Here’s a quick breakdown with some of the names I found:

In France - Kima, Motier, Super Capital, UI

In the UK - Seedcamp, Fuel, Octopus, Notion, SFC 

In Germany - HTGF, Heartfelt, Tiny, Earlybird, Bayern

In Sweden - Industrifonden, Chalmers, Norrsken, Navigare, Pale Blue Dot

In Spain - Inveready, Draper B1, Ship2B, K Fund, Angels Capital

In Italy - CDP, Azimut, LIFTT, Primo, Lazio

In Central Eastern Europe - Speedinvest, Calm/Storm, Presto, Credo, Depo

Americans - Sequoia, FJ, Acequia, Pareto, Headline

All this based on more than 10k transactions we’re tracking every year from the European ecosystem. If you’re looking for a source of good relevant data that’s manually curated (as opposed to second hand scraped from others), I encourage you to purchase a Nordic 9 subscription, it’s the best European intel money can buy.

Cheat sheets

• interesting early stage startups from overlooked European markets

• most promising 250 AI startups (and their backers)

• under the radar startups (updated every week)

• AI legal startups - link

• American investments in Europe - H2, H1

The best investors in Europe get access to our intel every week. Don’t be the one that’s left out, subscribe! 👇️ 

Market talk

🇨🇭 Apple hired at least 36 AI experts from Google and has created a secretive European laboratory in Zurich, to develop new AI models and products, per an FT story published this week.

• purchased two local AI start-ups too - FaceShift in 2015 and image recognition company Fashwell in 2019 - incorporated in the same team.

• FT went as far as interviewing neighbors who had no idea of an Apple office and says the poaching has started in 2018 - yet Apple’s got no standalone AI product to show for it. Siri, the closest to it, is just sub par to what a decent, consumer-facing LLP should perform like.

• but hey, Apple makes too much money to care - instead of catching up on AI, it is spending $100b+ to purchase its stock, for example - it’s a market signal baked in by CFOs sitting on a lot of cash in the bank, and companies do this when they think the stock is undervalued.

🧛 Also Apple is seemingly caving little by little to the EU’s DMA rules, meaning that the European business is more important than standing out for their (right or wrong) principles.

• it’s what dominant players do for market share protection. But here’s some food for thought - what if, or when, Apple, or any big tech for that matter, would say ‘this is not fair and enough is enough’ about the EU hunting them down with regulation, and will simply restrict their products to Europeans? How’s that for a scenario for a truly European independence of America? 😃 

🇫🇷 The French government wants to rescue Atos, a local IT holding company that is nearing bankruptcy.

• it’s a strategic company for the French, hence the governmental interest.

• fun fact - Atos had been CEO-ed by Thierry Breton for ten years until 2019, when the French guy, now 69, switched to a more comfortable politician seat giving him the unique chance to talk trash with tech celebrities over social media while regulating their business.

• yes, the same guy now creating rules for big American tech active in Europe - he is said to have left Atos in a bad financial shape and to be the reason for its existing struggles, but takes zero responsibility for it.

🇸🇪 Six months after striking against Tesla in Sweden, Unionen, the local largest trade union, also joined in other similar parties boycotting Tesla’s Swedish operations for not wanting to sign a formal agreement with the unions.

• it’s obviously more local ego and less business sense at this point, this looks like a rather Swedish socialist fight against American capitalists - if we’re only to consider that unions are paid to represent employees interests and some time ago Tesla’s employees in Sweden publicly said they’re happy at work.

• fwiw, Tesla never encouraged unionizing, seemingly an important reason for the current American administration not seeing eye to eye with Elon Musk.

• also worth noting is that Tesla is in the middle of its largest-ever round of global layoffs, which could end up being as high as 20 percent of its workforce. Sweden hasn’t been impacted at all, afaik, probably because it is just a sales and support outpost. Yet.

💲 Interesting debt rounds announced this week:

• SumUp - €1.5 billion

• Bolt - €220 million 

• Pleo - €40 million

🇪🇸 BBVA wants to acquire its Spanish rival Sabadell for €12 billion, four years after prior talks collapsed.

🇩🇰 Novo Nordisk wants to spend €188 million for seed investments in quantum startups.

🇱🇹 Vinted announced revenues of €596.3m in 2023, up 61% year on year.

🇫🇷 Alan is at €364m ARR and 516k members as for Q1 2023, 29% yoy (2023 growth was 38%). Still in red though.

🇫🇷 Fruitz is the third most popular dating app in France with over a million monthly active users on average, following Badoo and Tinder.

• Fruitz was founded in 2017 and acquired by the Americans from Bumble for $75 million in 2022.

💪 The euro zone exited recession as its four top economies drove much speedier growth than expected.

🇬🇷 Ellinikon is close to reality as it is set to become the largest smart city in Europe, on the southern coastline of Athens.

💲 The payments layercake

Mo’ Sundaying 

🇬🇧 Sadiq Khan has won a third successive term as mayor of London as he beat his Conservative rival Susan Hall by more than 276,000 votes.

• The voter turnout was 40.5% and the number of good votes was 2.48 million.

• London has a population of around 8.8 million.

🇪🇺 Dear Europe, please wake up. (context)

💲 Pitchbook is in the business of selling people’s private data.

👓 Meta is using Facebook and mobile phone data to produce super-granular household wealth estimates.

🤑 Alphabet paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 for Google to be Safari’s default search engine.

• In 2020, Google's payments constituted 17.5% of Apple's operating income.

🤯 The Silicon Valley investors seemingly embraced the fact that Trump is going to be the next American president - dude had a pre-recorded video shown at a tech conference promising to dump money into AI companies in the name of national security.

🏂 How private equity shapes a ski town.

🚰 A private company purchased land in a tiny Arizona town – and sold its water rights for a $14m gross profit, worrying local residents that water speculators scavenging agricultural land for valuable water rights will leave rural communities in the dust.

⛺ You can rent a tent in someone's central London home for a mere £80.

🖖🏻 Khomeini was 61 when he got involved in politics and 76 when he run a revolution. By contrast Lenin was 47, Hitler 34, Ataturk 38, Mao 34, Mussolini 39, Ho Chi Minh 55, and Gaddafi 27 when they launched their revolutions.

🥣 ‘Some things do stay the same. For instance, breakfast’ - Seinfeld in GQ promoting a movie he made.

🍲 Extreme dieting is the latest way for the mega-rich to signal their wealth and status.

💬 Do you have an inner monologue? Here’s what it reveals about you.

🐝 A little girl said monsters were in her bedroom. It was 60,000 bees.

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

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Created every Sunday by @drnovac of Nordic 9 with weekly notes and observations from the European startup ecosystem.

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