Good morning,

Welcome to Sunday CET - let’s get right at it.

Best,
Dragos

I have been thinking a bit about how the AI and data business impacts the local VC market - as some of you may know, we have been consistently tracking European transaction data over at Nordic 9 for almost ten years now, and sitting on such data makes for an interesting case in the AI era.

Back then I started Nordic9 because Crunchbase, Pitchbook and Dealroom sucked and I wanted a better option. Ten years later, those products still suck but it doesn’t matter as much, because today any respectable investor has their own dataroom.

My N9 advantage is that I am a consumer of my product for my own investing, zero overheads and no investors breathing down my neck - I basically have built a fast and efficient ecosystem for cleaning up and archiving N9 data, and all benchmarks show that we still have great intel when it comes to tracking what’s interesting in the long tail. Every week - and that’s how our paid intel product emerged, it’s a distillation of signal from the noise we all swim through daily.

Thinking back a little, the market has evolved, and vendors have not - the lack of creativity in this ecosystem is striking, basically everybody copies everybody to the dot, there’s hardly any differentiation, except for who’s shouting louder on the media channels, just like in a Turkish bazaar.

It’s a mere reflection of the ecosystem maturity - commodity traders in an emerging market. While the European buy side landscape has evolved a bit, it is still fairly small - 10-15k transactions a year, 5-10k investors and 30k-40k startups make for a pond not an ocean. Besides, it’s a lousy market, investors are bad customer profiles, and startups are poor - hence selling instead to governments, which is Dealroom’s core revenue, or doing events i.e. even Sifted is trying to justify its existence to FT with some sort of a data service while they mainly live off a yearly event.

How does AI change all of that? It depends, of course.

If you use it as an engine for intel, AI is actually not ideal because more often than not it will feed you false or out-dated information. On the other hand, if until now, for example, my N9 job was cleaning human slop from the public channels, now synthetic media makes the job 1000X harder. The aggregators don’t get it and it is why I am long on the journalism profession btw, which is a rara avis nowadays.

If you’re in the investment business, an AI is still not going to be better than a human for taste, no matter how much you train it. Yes, it can enhance productivity and provide outbound leads and thinking against a thesis, but won’t replace judgement. AI-enhanced CRMs on top of silos play an utility role for the greater VC scheme - but just a small variable in a venture business driven by network connections and that’s a spectacularly inefficient market. For every closed deal, there are probably 50-100 investor-startup interactions that went nowhere. Founders spend months pitching the wrong people. Investors spend 90% of their sourcing time on deals that never had a chance. That's where there’s real disruption, and almost nobody in the ecosystem is building for it.

Today, VCs have already bolted AI onto existing workflows, mostly glorified search and data aggregation. Not the only ones though, as on the other side of the market startups also started using AI to generate pitch materials and identify investors. Noise has increased dramatically - both sides get marginally faster at doing the same things badly.

It’s where we’re at today. This state of play will likely lead to an agent awakening moment, with bots acting autonomously on both sides. Investor agents continuously scan for opportunities matching a mandate. Startup agents qualify investors, prepare tailored materials, handle initial outreach. The volume of agent-to-agent interaction explodes. Noise will be even higher - it will be chaos.

Then what? I have some ideas - and most of what I'm reading out there misses it completely. Will see how that pans out.

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Start flowing free

We have screened almost 200 fundraising deals closed in Europe this week.

We archive/transform deal-related data into an easy-searchable intelligent asset at N9, and email a selection of the interesting ones to our customers every week.

Below a recap of the week.

🇪🇸 Clidrive - consumer finance marketplace
🇪🇪 Farsight Vision - situational awareness platform
🇸🇪 Intric - multi-modal AI assistant
🇨🇭 ​Manufact​ - open-source SDK for MCP
🇬🇧 Tangible Finance​ - debt marketplace for climate-tech startups
🇬🇧 The Bland Company - protein tech platform

🇬🇧 Onodrim - $47M seed
🇫🇷 ​Naboo​ - $70M series B
🇸🇪 Lassie - $75M series C
🇬🇧 ​Olix - $220M series A

We add more signals on Linkedin and keep a religious track of what’s interesting in Europe on Nordic9.

We produce intel notes for the best investors in Europe every week - join them!

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

Great, will forward • Good • Meh

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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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