Hello - welcome to Sunday CET!

For the new folks on the list, name is Dragos, I am the founder at Nordic 9 and this email is a weekly curation of what’s interesting in the VC and startup ecosystem in Europe.

Let’s get to it.

Top intel

We had a look at who were the more active investors in Europe in the first six months of the year - fwiw, we have tracked the activity of more than 5000 investors who dealt during the January-June 2023 period. They are the men in the European arena, still taking risks while everybody else is sitting on their arms and waiting while massaging LPs, creating social media nobody cares about or doing funny rebranding exercises.

Most of the later stage deals (i.e rounds higher than 20 million) were follow-ons, as expected given the market situation - EQT Ventures, Earlybird or Eurazeo were among the more active ones at this stage. Otoh, NEA, one of the traditional later stage investor from US, had only one follow-on out of their five European deals from the first part of the year. Alas, another one of those five had a lower entry point - i.e. $13M series A.

At 10M+ level, Balderton and DN Capital were among the more active out of the UK, Demeter in France and CDP in Italy. Notably, EQT Ventures is also on this list with a follow-on, an expensive pre-seed, a seed extension and a series A lead.

Seed-wise, the usual Seedcamp and Speedinvest suspects are on the top, albeit at a more timid pace compared to last year - other names include Point Nine, Headline or LocalGlobe. The very early stage segment (i.e. rounds lower than 5 million) also has the usual suspects - Fuel Ventures in the UK, Kima from France, HTGF in Germany and Fabrice Grinda’s FJ Labs deploying at a minimum 3 deals per month pace.

The full list with 100+ investors, broken by transaction value brackets and by geography, makes for a good first part of the year picture about who spent money, at what stage and where in Europe. Not least, we threw some angel investors names in there too - ended up with a cheat sheet that’s available for our customers.

💲 More 2023 Euro intel

• Overpriced Euro seed deals H1 2023 - link

• Notable American investments in Europe in H1 2023 - link

• What non-locals invested in in Europe in 2023 - link

• Investors who slowed down Europe funding in 2023 - link

• Q2 series A deals in Europe - link

Deals highlights this week

🇬🇧 ​Mindgard​, developing an enterprise platform used to automate security testing, detection, and remediation of their AI models, raised $3.8 million from IQ Capital and Lakestar. (press release)

🇫🇮 ​Younite-AI​, developing on-demand software at the intersection of AI & XR with a team of 80 engineers, raised a $8.8 million growth equity round with Bocap. (press release)

🇳🇴 ​Strise​, doing AI-enabled SaaS that is used for anti-money laundering (AML) and compliance issues, raised $11 million Series A funding round led by Atomico. (Tech EU)

🇮🇹 ​Arduino​, developing an open-source electronic prototyping platform allowing users to create interactive electronic objects, raised a $22 million series B extension round led by CDP Venture Capital and Anzu Partners. (press release)

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Fun fact: H2 Green Steel’s €1.5 billion equity round announced this week is higher than a half of the money raised by all the Swedish startups for the full 2023.

• If we exclude from that money Northvolt’s $1.2 billion convertible note announced last month, H2’s round equals the amount raised by all other startups in Sweden this year.

• Fwiw, to date we have tracked 400+ deals representing 4.5 billion spent by VCs in Sweden this year.

We cover (much) more early stage intel from the European long tail every week over at Monday CET.

More context

• All the guns on AI Lightspeed started doing AI-focused events in Europe - that’s good marketing.

• Spain has quietly become a collection of hubs with the biggest concentration of investors per sqm in Europe - the German edition.

• The VC market is a mess - folks are focused on valuation haircuts not on new dealflow, it will take 2-3 years to recover, M&A is frozen and selling out is not an option unless you are an instant asset for others’ balance sheets. In Europe that is - link (scroll down)

• The State of European B2B Marketplaces - link

• Fintech didn't correct, it crashed - here are three areas where the rebound and differentiation will happen.

• The value of a customer - The iPhone customer is 7.4 times more valuable than the Android customer.

• More VC soft literature on AI - let’s define opportunities for founders to build AI-first companies.

• Startup sourcing concierge - every week we send to our Monday CET subscribers a curation of interesting early stage startups from Europe. You can sample the archive with 100+ startups from 25 European countries here (available for free for the next 24 hours) and can subscribe to get in your inbox every week from here, alongside cheat sheets focused on European VC and weekly curated early deals.

More intel

The UK situation

• Series C is currently smaller than Series A

• take it with a grain of salt though, as extensions may be counted as full rounds.

• source

Current S23 YC batch broken down by type of AI startup

• iteration vs disruption, where’s the AI at?

% change in invested capital by industry

• fintech was deeply affected but was this because the value creation was mostly relying on ZIRP?

• source

Other stories

🇸🇪 Swedes at work ABBA, pop supergroup formed in Stockholm in 1972, is making more than $2 million a week touring as avatars.

• The band performs in front of a sold-out crowd in London seven times a week in a specially designed arena that seats about 3,000 people, and featuring LED screens that make the venue seem deeper and 291 speakers to deliver surround sound.

• The show sold more than 1.5 million tickets with an average ticket price of about $100 - that’s $150 million in revenue - while its production cost is said to be $175 million.

• The tour has been running in London only for 15 months and is about to expand to Asia and the US.

• Pophouse is the largest investor in ABBA Voyage - it was founded in 2014 by Conni Jonsson, co-founder of the Swedish private equity firm EQT, and by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus.

• Pophouse is not a professional investor per se but a holding group operating in the hospitality and music events industry.

🇪🇺 Telefonica and Vodafone - two of Europe's biggest telecom firms - now have Middle Eastern investors as their top shareholders.

• Saudi Arabia's STC paid $2.25 billion for a 10% stake in Telefonica.

• Abu Dhabi state-controlled Emirates Telecom controls 11% of Vodafone and is its biggest shareholder.

• Bonus link: the Middle East becomes the world’s ATM.

🇩🇪 BMW finally discovered that copying out-innovating Tesla’s SAAS model involves selling software and not access to heated seats against a subscription.

🇸🇪 Spotify is testing making its in-app lyrics feature exclusive to its Premium tier as the company looks to make users pay up for their music service.

🇪🇺 The man in the arena The EU made a little drawing and it is ready to rock and roll.

🇮🇪 Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary was hit with a pie by environmental activists during a press conference in Brussels. O'Leary was not injured and continued with the press conference.

🇭🇺 Hungary's government offered to buy a majority stake in Budapest Airport for around €4 billion.

🇪🇺 Meta decided to axe Facebook News in Europe and end a scheme to fund local journalism in the UK. So much for the media illusion of getting free traffic on the back of an American tech company.

💪 OpenAI will host a developer conference - its first ever - on November 6, where it will preview new tools and exchange ideas.

👀 Uber is reportedly working on a TaskRabbit-like service that will let app users hire people to conduct various tasks in an expansion beyond driving and deliveries.

🇺🇸 Clubhouse (remember Clubhouse?) will pivot away from live audio to a messaging app, with a focus on voice messages and group chats.

💲 Sequoia has its investors​ worried​ that it lost its edge.

Quote of the week

Mo’ Sundaying

🇬🇧 Periodic reminder that the UK is a poorly run country - and, btw, incompetence is not the fault of the French or the bad luck.

• Nothing seemingly works as advertised in the UK, including the weather which has been amazing in London this week. 🙃 

🇫🇷 France used to be the "China of Europe" - 1 in 25 people globally was French and 1 in 5 Europeans was French. Now, France is smaller than Germany and virtually identical in population to Britain. Thread.

🇹🇷 Turkey sentenced the founders of the now bankrupt crypto exchange Thodex to 11,196 years in jail - 400K+ users of Thodex have lost $2B+ in deposits.

🇺🇸 The Pentagon intends to build a series of military AI systems and autonomous land, air and sea drones over the next two years to keep pace with China.

🇨🇳 China told all government officials to cease using iPhones at work and start using China-owned brands like Huawei.

• It is planning to expand its iPhone ban to include state-controlled companies and organizations in an effort to further reduce its dependence on foreign technology.

• China has more than 150,000 state-owned companies, according to state media, employing more than 56 million people in 2021.

👁️‍🗨️ Invasive species cost the world more than $400 billion every year - that amount has quadrupled each decade since 1970.

🤭 The ideal life is to spend:

• your twenties in London,

• your thirties in New York

• your forties in Paris

• your fifties on a mid size Italian or Spanish city by the seaside (i.e. Genoa, Venice, Bilbao)

Discuss

🤔 Putting things in perspective

😎 George Clooney, who’s like the mayor of Lake Cuomo in Italy, has put his villa from the area for sale for €100 million. He purchased the property from the Heinz family for $10 million in 2002.

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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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