140+ Hot Danish Startups to Follow
When I started working at Idinvest Partners about a year ago, the plan was to increase our investment rhythm outside of France. We made progress and our last 10 deals include such investments as Peakon (Denmark), Planday (Denmark), Secret Escapes (UK), Onfido (UK), NGData (Belgium), Financefox (Germany), but we still have room to improve our knowledge of local ecosystems to find the best entrepreneurs.
Denmark is a country we are focusing on and I am not going to explain why now: my colleague Guillaume Durao already brilliantly wrote about that here. After our 2 first investments in Denmark — which were quite opportunistic — we now want to have a more granular approach of local ecosystems and get better at identifying and qualifying local startups.
So we decided to Map Copenhagen Startup Scene
- We’re publishing a first curated list of 140+ Copenhagen hot startups: a map + an excel file which can be seen as an open-source project. Only startups that were founded in Copenhagen
- This file will remain available publicly and will be updated over time. For each startup you will find: company name, description of the activity provided by Pitchbook or Crunchbase, website URL, foundation year, HQ country & HQ city, total funding, employee count, crunchbase link when available. For more details about the data set please refer to the “Data Set FAQ” section at the bottom of this article where I explain how we built this list. Suggestions/comments are welcome (ju@idinvest.com).
- Why Copenhagen? Because my colleague Guillaume and I are in the area once a month to spend time with our portfolio companies (Planday & Peakon), meet other cool startup founders, accelerator managers, startup events organizers, etc. The cities of Malmö — linked to Copenhagen by the Oresund Bridge — and Aarhus — second largest city in Denmark — also have flourishing startups ecosystem that would deserve a similar mapping (in the coming months!).
4 Key Numbers & Takeaways from this Mapping
The mapping includes 140+ Copenhagen-founded startups, of which 100+ raised money with VCs or Business Angels.
- Categories: ~75% of the startups are Softwares (~43%), Marketplaces (~20%) or Consumer-mobile based (~12%).
By the way the three biggest Danish tech exits were Skype (Consumer / Mobile — acquired $8.5bn), Just Eat (Marketplace — IPO in 2014, $2.7bn) and Zendesk (Software — IPO in 2014, $2.2bn)
2. Funding: VC-backed companies raised on average $9.6m but the median funding is around $2.5m. The average total funding for Software startups is around $14m vs. $2m for Marketplaces.
3. From Copenhagen to San Francisco: ~6.5% of these companies are HQ’ed in the US. 70% of those are Softwares and VC-backed companies now HQ’ed in the US raised on average $60m.
4. Company size: approximately 90% of the startups have less than 50 employees. It’s around 50% for US-HQ’ed startups.
You can find the full list of startups here and have access to more granular data and graphs in the “Graphs” tab.
Top 3 Highest-funded Startups in this List
Data Set FAQ
What startups are considered in the study?
- There are only startups that were founded in Copenhagen, wherever their HQ is.
- Exited companies were removed from the study.
- We excluded Life Sciences / Cleantech companies because we do not invest in these areas.
- We did not include the earliest startups (no website or private beta version).
How did you build the list?
- First, we built this list with locals! A big thank you to Christoffer Malling and his team #CPHFTW (Copenhagen For The Win) who helped us curate this list.
- Crunchbase
- Pitchbook
- Angel List
- Nordic and Danish tech media: CPHFTW, TrendsOnline, Inno Overblik, Iværksætteren and the Nordic Web (the NL is a must to get Nordic tech news!).
We tried to get as accurate data as possible by crossing information between all of these sources.
Where is the open source excel file?
I think there is a hot Copenhagen-founded startup you forgot!
We’re conscious that we potentially missed super-promising startups so we would be happy to add those (send me an email here: ju@idinvest.com). The idea is to update the file over time to get accurate, updated, exhaustive data.
Why Aarhus & Malmö startups are not there?
We started with Copenhagen and our plan is to open source similar projects for other European cities! Aarhus (Denmark) & Malmö (Sweden) are startups hubs which DNA and local players are different from Copenhagen. If you want to open source similar studies for other European cities and work together, feel free to contact me (ju@idinvest.com).
If you want to be kept informed of the next City startups mapping releases, you can subscribe to this email list.
Thanks Guillaume, Antoine & Stan for the help
