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Good morning, people, and welcome to Sunday CET, my weekly digest covering the European startup ecosystem!

This week was YC’s Demo Day, meaning related media coverage for the startups in the program - but the program takes three months and good investors have already dug through the list in a timely manner, right? And so have I for our customers, btw - so it’s just fitting this week to have a look at who are those backing startups incubated by YC.

Thought and comments? Talk to me!

Thanks for reading,
Dragos

Market talk

Who funds YC startups?

This week’s YC demo day put a touch of media attention on the (European) startups part of the winter program (the interesting ones are here). People in the know already have circulated the list for a few weeks already - what’s less talked about though is who is likely to invest into them.

Conventional wisdom says that, in general, those assets are expensive for European investors appetite anyways while the very first reason for an European startup going to YC is finding backers other than the homeland material. Alas there’s a number of local dudes allocating space in the portfolio on regular basis, examples including Moonfire, Kima, Speedinvest at early stages and Atomico, EQT Ventures or Index doing funding later on, at growth.

How about investors that backed the 2023 batches, I hear you say? Nordic 9 to the rescue, quickly crunched out last year’s data and got a bunch of names, a selection of which I listed below in a random order:

🇫🇷 Kima Ventures- Twenty, Cargo, Upstream etc
🇫🇷 Super Capital - Fragment 
🇫🇷 Singular VC - Osium
🇫🇷 Frst - Escape Technologies 
🇫🇷 Motier Ventures - Respaid 
🇩🇪 La Famiglia - Langfuse
🇩🇪 468 capital - Haven
🇬🇧 Moonfire - Healthtech 1
🇸🇪 Creandum - atla ai
🇳🇱 Endgame Capital - Elyos
🇬🇷 Venture Friends - The Alphs
🇵🇱 SMOK Capital - Slicker
🇨🇿 Zaka VC - MediSearch

And some American investors backing European startups:
🇺🇸 Goodwater - The Alphs, Pluto Markets;
🇺🇸 DVC - Aglide, Solve Intelligence;
🇺🇸 Lightspeed - Langfuse;
🇺🇸 Haystack - OpenMeter;
🇺🇸 Initialized - Orbio Earth;
- etc.

We’ll see how this year fares.

PS1. Special mention goes to Flower from Germany which raised both seed and series A ($20M) within 12 months upon graduation last winter.

PS2. forget YC and AI, Gundo is where it’s at if you’re serious people, that is - 1, 2, 3, 4.

Cheat sheets

• a list of 259 interesting early stage Euro startups

  • manually curated by me with what’s hot in Europe - startups you won’t find in the media and which will likely raise this year

  • it comes with a downloadable xls file, w/ description, signals and investment history

  • one time cost, no subs - hit reply if you’re interested.

• AI legal startups - link

• VC seed mark-ups - link (also comes with a file)

• 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

This week: 

• notable:

  • 🇫🇮 ​Benjamin, 🇷🇴 ​Genezio, 🇫🇷 ​Kor etc etc​​​, ​, ​​, ​​, ​

  • ​, early stage deals done by Lightspeed, Iconiq, IVP, Atomico

  • $3 billion in new funds announced to be invested in Europe

• get the intel 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 

🇬🇧 If the Labour party wins the UK elections from later this year, as expected, it’s set to raise the capital gains tax on carried interest from 28% to as much as 45, which is the income tax for higher earners in the UK.

• this would affect 3000 people working in PE in the City directly incentivised to the carried interest part of their packages - for noobs, that’s the cut of profits they make above a certain threshold on successful deals.

• in 2022, those guys took home about £5 billion in annual carried interest vs £3.4 billion in 2021.

• the tax objective: add £400-600 million to the Treasury budget.

• it looks like socialism but it’s just desperation :-) - fwiw, France, Italy and Germany tax carried interest at between 26 per cent and 34 per cent.

• it could be worse than Brexit.

🇫🇷 The story of a $145 million deal in one quote:

• Our current investors told us ‘if you’re going to raise money in 18 months to scale with others, we might as well offer you great terms right now for an internal round.’ And everything happened very quickly… In one week, it was a done deal.

🇪🇺 A look at alternative iPhone app stores in the European Union, after EU enabled the DMA.

• Apple allows now game emulators and lets music streaming apps in the EU link to external websites

🇺🇸 Good Q&A with Eric Liaw, who’s doing IVP from London.

🇺🇸 Tiger raised ~$2.2B for its latest fund, well short of the $6B target and its smallest fundraising haul in about a decade, after raising a $12.7B fund.

💲 Elon Musk is close to raise $3 billion for its AI-on-top-of-Twitter product xAI, at a $18 billion valuation.

🤖 Jony Ive of Apple’s design fame and Sam Altman of OpenAI are also said to raise about $1 billion for building a startup on top of a portable device that uses AI.

💲 Alphabet, Google’s mother company, is mulling an offer to buy HubSpot for $35 billion.

• Google also considers charging for AI-powered search in big change to business model - Google has lost the plot, it has no idea how to handle its AI situation, a classic CC disruption case.

🚧 How Hertz’s bet on Teslas went horribly sideways

☕ Gossip - Marissa Mayer’s startup is already in disarray after just having launched a photo sharing up for people in their 50s last week, according to anonymous sources.

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Mo’ Sundaying 

🦾 An AI tool tested by the NHS successfully identified tiny signs of breast cancer in 11 women which had been missed by human doctors.

🇩🇪 Germany is stuck in the past:

• A regional chain running a network of 40 fully-automated retail stores is forced to close shops down on Sundays because of the Sunday rest law applicable to any supermarket in Germany.

• Anecdotes about working with banks in Germany.

• the German state is locking up up key public documents behind paywalls.

🤖 The 2024 MAD (Machine Learning, AI & Data) landscape.

🇬🇧 London restaurant - we can’t make a profitable business and instead of raising menu prices will just add up on the bill the margin percentage we’re short of *and* cut off waiters’ tips.

💲 Last year's Formula 1 race had a total economic impact on the city of Las Vegas of $1.5 billion, including visitor spending of $884 million.

💪 NASA was tasked with developing a time zone for the moon.

🇺🇸 Youngsters are ditching online travel agents like Expedia and Booking in favor of credit card travel portals, such as Chase Travel and Capital One Travel - it’s an American thing though.

• Also American adults think they’ll need just $1.46 million for a comfortable retirement.

🇬🇧 Walk a mile to save £34 on an Edinburgh-London rail ticket.

💲 The New York City's transportation authority wants participants in the annual New York City Marathon to pay a bridge toll.

🇫🇷 Emmanuel Macron turns out to be quite popular across the EU -- except in France.

• same with Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, who also seemingly wants to replace AC units with a water-cooling system for the Olympic athletes this coming July because of climate change.

💸 Germans and Austrians are in Russians pockets, the Wirecard edition.

💭 Ocean Eleven but for real - burglars steal $30 millions in one of the largest cash heists in Los Angeles history.

👫 The history of luxury in 50 objects, from Cleopatra’s barge to Louis Vuitton trunks.

😃 Everybody has a niece that wants an internship in ventures.

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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