Nov 18, 2016

/ Neil Murray Yannick Roux , a VC at EC1 Capital in London has been keeping track of all of the new European funds that have been announced this year and incredibly, just shy of €4 billion has been raised in total by new and repeat funds alike. Of the six biggest funds raised in 2016, three of them are actually located within the Nordics. With these three funds contributing more than 25% of the total themselves, I was keen to calculate just how much of this fresh €4 billion is likely to be invested in the region. The first thing to consider is that not all of the money that EQT Ventures , Northzone and Creandum have raised will be invested in the Nordics. In fact, by analysing their recent past investments, it's more accurate to project that 50%, 50% and 80% respectively is likely to end up in Nordic companies. In addition to these three, a fourth Nordic based fund raised this year, Finnish Lifeline Ventures , who we project (again based on recent past activity) will spend 95% of their new capital in the region. Then, we have the funds outside of the Nordics that have either recently invested in the region or stated their intentions to, these are Daphni (€150M), Partech (€400M) and Blue Yard Capital (€100M). From these we project that 10% of their funds will be spent in the Nordics, resulting in €15M, €40M and €10M respectively. Providing us with: Meaning, we project that just short of €700 million from the €4 billion these new funds have raised will be spent in the Nordics over the next few years. This is 17.72% of the total. To put that in perspective, using Tech.eu's €11.92 billion total for the amount invested in European companies in 2015, and our total of €1.7 billion invested in the Nordics , that's an increase from the 14.26% share that the Nordics claimed last year. Of course, these totals from 2015 also include investments that came from funds outside of Europe (and existing European funds), but even so, it's fair to say that the new fund activity we've seen in Europe this year is likely to increase rather than decrease the Nordics overall share of the European investment pie in the next couple of years. “In the tech world, things move fast and companies are born anywhere in the world. I’m able to have an ear to the ground with The Nordic Web - the content is fresh, local, and of high quality, which is exactly what you need as a seed investor. In fact, it’s through Neil Murray’s newsletter that I first heard about Mapillary. Several months later, I was fortunate to lead our firm’s investment in the Company to help drive the creation of a crowdsourced visual representation of our world” — Nathan Benaich, Playfair Capital Subscribe to The Nordic Web Weekly Email Address