Announcing Dawn’s $700m fundraise to power Europe’s global software ambitions
Every day, every week, every year, software changes the world. It powers everything we do — how we live, how we work and how the world innovates and operates. Creative destruction is a constant in software; new innovations replace and make obsolete older innovations. For ambitious founders — in Europe and across every corner of the globe — this never-ending cycle of invention and adoption creates enormous value creation opportunities for themselves, their customers, their investors, and society as a whole.
This year, software spend globally topped $1 trillion. This figure has doubled inside a decade, and Gartner estimates spending will reach $7 trillion by 2050. It has unquestionably been a challenging last 18 months for tech, but software is truly in its infancy. And we are never going back regardless of what headlines might state. Why? Because digitisation only travels one way, forward, and mega-trends are still in their early stages. Cloud adoption across enterprise is just 25%, while major sectors like our financial and healthcare systems grapple everyday within the confines of legacy tech. Moreover, new societal challenges requiring novel software solutions continue to present themselves. The coming decade will demand enormous advancements in areas including climate change, the energy transition, financial inclusion, and drug development.
With AI, we are at the beginning of another major technology shift, which is not even included in Gartner’s $7 trillion figure. AI is both a significant opportunity in itself, as well as a disruptor to every software category — and will unleash untold productivity gains for enterprise. Not unlike when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone back in 2007, it is hard to fully comprehend the impact that AI will deliver on our personal and professional lives.
Yet, the most exciting part for us is that European founders are poised to deliver some of the seminal companies that will underpin these tech stacks of the future, reflecting our share of fundamental research and the global economy. The foundations for success have never been better. Europe presents significant structural advantages for founders building software, from unprecedented technical talent through to world-leading regulatory leadership and research.
Third and fourth generation founders are building with more experienced and competitively-priced talent than ever before, and the region’s network of specialist seed funds is stronger than ever, helping founders to productise and develop rigorous go to market strategies even earlier. On top of this, Europe’s industrial and educational heritage has helped form the deep, inter-connected networks required to produce technical solutions to the world’s most complex challenges, with a regulatory backdrop that offers natural advantages for companies innovating emerging technologies such as AI.
What a monumental time to be investing in European B2B software.
Today, we couldn’t be more excited to announce our latest $700m fundraise. We have raised fresh capital to invest in the best-of-the-best European founders pioneering the technology innovations that will drive these monumental platform shifts over the coming decades.
Our fundraise comprises two new funds: the $620m ‘Dawn V’, our most ambitious flagship fund to date and the largest dedicated early-stage B2B software fund ever raised in Europe, and our $80m follow-on fund, ‘Dawn Opportunities III’. Dawn V will support founders from Series A and B stage with initial cheques of $10m to $40m, while Dawn Opportunities III will enable us to continue backing our portfolio winners from Series C stage onwards. Combined, these funds ensure we can continue meaningfully investing in founders building the next generation of software from Series A all the way to exit.
We were determined to raise capital of commensurate scale to the enormous opportunity before us, and are hugely grateful to both our long-standing and new investors for their steadfast support. Our investors are based around the globe — across Europe, the US, Asia and the Middle East — and include three-quarters of our family of Dawn founders, all of whom are as excited and optimistic as we are about the opportunity in Europe today.
Our fundraise is testament to generations of exceptional founders, and a wider European tech landscape that has truly come of age. We founded Dawn in 2007 to support European entrepreneurs building global software leaders, at the time when capital was scarce for founders wanting to scale their businesses whilst remaining close to their support systems and networks. Our founding ethos hasn’t changed, and we still strive to be our founders’ hardest working investor, but the ecosystem around us has evolved beyond anything we could have imagined at the time.
We’re at the start of a new chapter for European B2B software, and we’re confident our future founders will ensure this is a golden vintage.
