Good morning,

Welcome to Sunday CET.

Fresh coffee, 9 Celsius with a bit of sun and a packed email with what I saw in the European ecosystem this week - hope it makes for a nice springy Sunday for you all.

Thanks for reading, enjoy!

Dragos

Market talk

This week I had a look at the American investors activity in Europe from last year - their appetite could be a good signal of what Europe produces in terms of assets w/ venture-sized returns potential. Many interesting promising deals closed in the past six months, both early stage and late stage.

I like Sequoia’s market leading game, super active on at least three directions - directly, via the scout fund and via its accelerator, they’re one of the best for a reason, hard to beat them strategically. Also like GC’s later stage game - 9 deals at 10M+ in the past year, 4 of which at 50M+ and 2 of which 100M+. Combined with La Famiglia’s early stage acquisition, it makes for a powerful European play.

Lightspeed notably slowed down last year - they did announce five early stage deals though (one of which is Mistral) and exited from Bonner. a16z is in there too albeit with only an isolated crypto presence in London - but they did lead the series A of the most promising European software startup in history, and that shows strength.

That’s what I see at the top of the market. At the edges, Lowercarbon spent a lot on European vertical assets compared to other American peers last year, Google’s GV has built an interesting portfolio as well as Khosla, with Vinod himself leading some of the deals, like this one - Vinod turned 69 this year, btw.

More digging through about 100 startups funded by American investors in Europe in this cheat sheet available for our paying customers.

Cheat sheets

• American investments in Europe - H2, H1

• interesting series A from last year - H2, Q2, Q1

• (>$10M) seed deals from last year - H2, H1

• interesting angel deals from last year - Q4, Q3

Intel highlights from this week 

• notable deals:
  🇫🇷 ​Agnostic, 🇬🇧 ​Limbic​, 🇫🇮 ​IFC​,., 🇸🇪 ​Syre,​, 🇹🇷 ​intenseye​ 
  ​, ​+ long tail curation of what’s interesting at early stages

• get them on your inbox alongside access to comprehensive proprietary data, long tail moves and strategic intel → subscribe.

Join hundreds of other investors and stay on top of the best early stage intel in Europe.

Also notable 

🇬🇧 Monzo was officially valued at $5 billion as it raised more capital in order to expand - unclear if it’s a scale or scope expansion, or both.

• round was financed by Google via both its growth investment vehicle (CapitalG) and its early stage fund (GV), and by a Chinese VC fka Sequoia Capital China.

• 9 million retail customers in the UK, 2 of which added last year, which is solid.

• for comparison, Wise had 8 million customers when it was priced at $5 billion in a similar deal back in 2020. It’s now handling twice as many and is listed on the LSE.

🇬🇧 Virgin Money was acquired by Nationwide in a £2.9 billion deal that would create a mortgage and savings group second only in the UK to Lloyds Banking Group.

• biggest UK bank takeover since the 2008 financial crisis - Nationwide is UK's biggest building society with more than 17 million customers.

• Virgin Money is the sixth largest retail bank with around 6.6 million customers and 91 branches.

• the Virgin brand would be phased out over six years once the takeover deal is completed.

🇩🇰 Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk is now more valuable than Tesla after it announced that a pill version of its obesity drug worked well in a small trial.

• nearly half of Novo's current valuation is based on the company's pipeline of new experimental drugs.

🇩🇪 This week the high-end fashion brand Hugo Boss had its worst trading day since 2016, after it said it expects sales to grow more slowly.

• more specifically - 3% to 6% growth in 2024, compared to a 18% yoy increase on the previous year, when the Germans did 4.2 billion.

🇫🇷 France hired a guy from Google to run an AI-based military intel agency that will employ 300 people and will spend a yearly budget of 300 million.

• hopefully they won’t conclude that it’s better to become VCs, I hear it’s trendy.

• jokes aside, everybody knows that France’s thing is sovereignty, whatever that means in a global world, and it kind of makes sense since it refused to be part of another head scratching 1 billion VC initiative made by NATO itself in 2023.

💪 Never underestimate Eastern Europeans:

• the Albanian government uses ChatGPT to translate thousands of pages of EU legal measures and provisions into shqip (Albanian language) and provide a detailed overview of what and where changes need to be made to local legislation to align with EU rules.

• Mira Murati, the company’s CTO, was born in Albania.

🇪🇺 Nice podcast with the UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti made by Nicolai Tangen of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.

• cool and down-to-earth - dude oversaw the 2023 UBS takeover of its Swiss rival Credit Suisse, which was a historical deal and for which he provides the story background.

• some quotes:

  • if you as an asset manager cannot pay for the cost of your capital you’re in trouble

  • the meaningful banks mergers in Europe are realised only in times of system stress (or because of that thereof) and this puts Europeans at disadvantage against the bigger worldwide players.

  • the European politicians and regulators are deliberately suppressing the continent’s banks and allow US rivals to dominate globally - i.e. this means fragmentation, regulation, no capital markets union etc. Same story with the airlines business.

  • Euro provincial thinking of favouring their own national champions, forgetting that winning the national championships doesn't take you very far in the global game.

🇪🇺 Techcrunch put together an overview of how DMA gatekeepers are responding to the EU’s new competition rules → TL;DR, a lot of legalese acknowledging compliance, to some extent.

• Amazon | Apple | Facebook | Google | Tiktok

🇬🇧 Elon Musk is hiring software engineers for its AI product built on top of Twitter, called xAI.

• in the London office that is, which is in Piccadilly Circus.

• dude is said to have raised for this thing in the $6 billion range at $20 bill post.

🇪🇺 Folks complained to the ECB’s HR as a board member made the following internal remark:

• “Anyone already working at the ECB should be retrained […] Why would we want to hire people whom we have to re-program because they came from the best universities but they still don’t know how to spell the word ‘climate’.”

• having an opinion is not popular in any ecosystem these days, I guess - woke people, nowadays mere snowflakes in disguise, are on an active cancel mode, that’s a thing of the times we live in.

💲 Speaking of daring to have critical opinions, Apple killed Epic’s iOS game store plans over App Store criticism. A decision they’d regretted as two days later, they changed their minds and re-instated Epic’s access to publish iOS apps in Europe.

• this is already turning into a bad telenovela by day, paid for and starring the richest company on the planet, which is sad.

• the EU took it as a pretext to find more evidence of power play - to which Apple conceded that Epic’s European account, called Epic Sweden AB, can be restored.

• fact is that the politicians over this side of the ocean are pissed off at Apple already and Apple’s behaviour is not making things better. They’re at war, after all.

• as I said last week, this is far from over, every week there’s a new episode dropping in, waiting for a Hollywood/book version of it.

• related stories:

  • EU fines Apple €1.8 billion, 3X+ more than it was previously expected - the fine seems commensurate to the size of Apple’s aggressiveness. Btw, have you noticed that it’s Apple against everybody, nobody seems to take its side, not even a little.

  • the alternative iPhone app stores will stop working if you travel outside the EU for longer than 30 days.

  • would Google really launch its own app store on iOS?

  • Big Tech companies complained to the White House about EU regulations - the Biden administration sent two official letters of protest, but it stopped short of pushing the issue.

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Mo’ Sundaying 

• Some interesting NLs you should give a try to (sponsored):
  - latest game-changing early-stage startups and weekly startup funding insights link
  - secrets from the world's best founders on how they grew their startups link

• My friends from Malmö are putting together a new edition of their event in May, now called Mashup - an invite-only creme de la creme, top founders, top investors (angels, VCs and LPs).

• This piece about zombie VCs is only worth for the following quote:
  - Telling people you are a VC also gets you into a lot of glitzy parties and conferences. No one wants to give that up by saying they don’t have money to invest. In VC, you don't stop having your job until you say you do, right?

• A 17-year-old German coder lives on trains, entirely legally, with a surprising amount of comfort.
  - he travels 1000 km a day throughout Germany aboard DB trains.
  - at night he sleeps on a moving ICE.
  - this costs him some 10k a year.

• How Ireland & Scotland are ruining their housing markets.

• It’s good to be a king - the British royals have received payments equivalent to more than £1 billion from two land and property estates.

• HP is in the rent-a-printer business now.

• Journalists discovering the obvious - Chinese crime syndicates are using cryptocurrencies to launder billions of dollars, including money raised from helping supply drugs to the U.S. or scamming American victims.

• 30 chefs open up about tipping, Gen Z cooks, and Youtube customers.

• Pentagon says no evidence of alien technology found in any government investigation.

• Global distribution of penguins.

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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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