Angular Ventures is super excited to release our 2020 Data Deck on Enterprise & Deep Tech VC Investment in Europe & Israel. 73 pages of proprietary data & analysis. (Thank you @poetential for all the hard work here!)
As with everything, this is a massive team effort. Andrew @poetential Posaste did an amazing amount of work on this. Couldn't have done it without. Thank you, Andrew! (Founders who haven't met him yet should reach out...)
As always, we are hand-curating the data - which is why it takes time and why there are sometimes little errors - but it's also why we think our data is and view on the market is more accurate than anything else out there.
Europe & Israel saw over $45B of VC investment in 2020, a new record.
In retrospect, it's clear there was no overall negative impact of Covid on investment pace (contrary to what we and many others expected). 2Q20 was slow, but 3Q and 4Q were very strong - with 4Q an all-time record.
As our work @AngularVentures focuses on Enterprise & Deep Tech (E&DT). In recent years, this has been the majority of the dollars invested in Europe/Israel. We like being contrarian, but are glad that investors are recognizing the incredible potential of EU/IL E&DT founders.
Here's a look at the breakdown by country of E&DT versus consumer. UK, Germany, and Sweden are still seeing a lot of consumer investment E&DT dominates most other markets.
Heatmaps are cool.
Israel and Estonia have higher VC $ per capita than the US. Sweden is nearly at the US level. The UK is still less than half the US on a per capita basis.
Most of the growth in EU/IL E&DT VC investment is from later stage rounds.
The number of ANNOUNCED early-stage rounds continues to increase, but far slower than the total dollars would suggest. We believe there is a shift to later-stage rounds, but we also believe that early stage rounds are increasingly not being announced.
Looked at strictly through the E&DT lens, 2020 was actually slightly weaker than 2019 - but this is due to less megaround activity in total. Early round activity increased somewhat.
Corporate VCs remained active - mostly in Israel and the UK.
Round sizes continue to trend up strongly - something that may be artificially depressing the number of early rounds. Many companies are just skipped a phase and moving right to the big round.
In 2020, more E&DT VC capital flowed into Israel than any other market in Europe, with over $7.4B invested. UK was next at $6.5B. France ($3.8B) and Germany ($2.6B) were distant 3rd and 4th.
The UK led Europe in the number of VC rounds announced. This raises some uncomfortable questions: Are too many companies in the UK getting formed? Are too few seed rounds taking place in Israel?
In terms of E&DT volume, Southern Europe, Iberia, and BeNeLux are growing the fastest. Eastern Europe seems to be in retreat.
US VC participation in early-stage rounds in Europe/Israel remains very rare. At the later stages, this is far more common.
US VC activity is concentrated in Israel and UK, but is spreading across Europe.
We think this is pretty cool. Here's a league table of US VCs active in Europe, broken down by region.
And here is the same league table of US VCs active in Europe, broken down by stage of activity.
And here (thank you @poetential!) is a very cool chart showing which US VCs are becoming more or less active in Europe/Israel.
My favorite part of the analysis is the breakdown by vertical. We've added a few new verticals (data tooling, dev tooling, and ML tooling).
Here's a breakdown of which verticals within E&DT are seeing more or less investment across Europe & Israel. Retail and HR are booming.
And here are the top segments. "Enterprise Marketing SaaS," "Enterprise Financial SaaS," and "Enterprise Security Software" were the top three.
Here's our cheat sheet of European & Israeli Venture.
In the actual report, we have a breakdown of 12 different countries by stage and vertical.
Here's an overview of VC activity in the "physical" world.
And here's a breakdown of VC investment trends in the "new stack" of IT infrastructure.
Industrial tech is also booming.
Hope you enjoyed this quick tour through the report. Please share with your friends and contacts - and download the whole report here. medium.com/angularventure…
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Secret of early-stage investing in a four easy steps:
1. Develop a strong internal sense of what "truly great" looks like. This is the key step. Get this wrong and the rest is irrelevant. Here you must be intellectually honest and very humble. "Truly great" is a matter of fact not opinion. A matter of past not future.
The best way to do step 1 is to encounter truly great. Work at a company that is truly great. Work at a VC firm that is truly great and invests in companies that are truly great. Constantly ask: "did I earn the right to this opinion about greatness?"
People seem to going absolutely bananas about an Israeli proposal to establish an age-based and points-based system for Coronavirus release.
Regretfully, I mistakenly characterized this as a "policy" as opposed to a "proposal" in a twitter thread that has absolutely exploded (nearly 700K views - completely insane).
Again, let me add the necessary caveats that I am CLEARLY not an expert on anything related to Coronavirus. That said, I think it's worth highlighting a view things:
Woke up to good news from Israel on ending the Coronavirus lockdown this morning, which I think should be shared widely in English.
With the appropriate caveats that I am not an expert in any relevant field, here's my best understanding of what the Israeli government is doing to end the lockdown:
Israel has had ~200 deaths and ~15,000 confirmed cases so far. It was early to close flights and impose lockdowns.
VC market has completely locked up. Growth stage bankers are reaching out to me (a very early-stage fund) to see if we want to join $10M rounds.
Any VC saying they are "open for business" or "business as usual" is lying or stupid. You probably don't want either on your cap table over the long run. Angular is still considering new investments, but our stratospherically high bar is astronomically high now.
We are also making a real effort to triage dealflow very early in the process to give founders definitive feedback (i.e. "no" in 99.9% of cases) within hours of getting their material so that they can focus on more promising leads and so that we can focus on other things as well.
1/ Increasingly hearing about double-digit million "Series A" rounds on companies with low single-digit ARRs.
2/ Revenue multiples on these things are in the 20-30x range sometimes, which is pushing post-money valuations towards the $100M mark and beyond.
3/ For a truly unique tech and a truly stellar team, this is not necessarily irrational - not in a world where a lot of markets can sustain more than one player with $100M+ revenue levels.