Yet while London is closing in on San Francisco on the traditional FinTech side, it seems farther away on the blockchain side. Pitchbook has San Francisco with more than 3x as many VC-backed blockchain startups as London. The two London startups that have most of their team members in the city and are achieving scale are Blockchain and Elliptic
- August 2019. Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital
Hi Paul, there are more companies in London that are doing well than just Blockchain and Elliptic. Let’s have a look.
- There is a massive information gap around the funding of European blockchain / crypto companies. The classic data providers don’t capture the full ecosystem making it difficult to have a clear and data-driven view of the market. Hence, most US investors are underestimating the European ecosystem
- As such, I have started to make a list of London-based companies and gathered some data ranging from Funding, FTE, Sector, Investors etc…
Startups: 44 companies with $410m+ raised and 1,800+ FTE
- 44 crypto / blockchain companies headquartered in London of which
- 17 early stage (Raised <=$3m)
- 22 Growth stage (Raised >$3m and <$20m)
- 5 Late stage (Raised $20m+)
Note, most funding numbers are based on public press release. For some lacking data, I estimated the number of funding raised. If it’s not correct, just email me. I’ll update it asap.
- Number of Equity funded companies: 38
- Number of ICO/Token launch funded companies: 6
- Total funding raised: $410m+
- Total number of total employees: 1,800+ (This includes not only London-based FTE)
- Median age: 3 years
- Number of companies revenue generating: 29
- Number of companies with a token business model: 6
Corporates: London is still the centre of Europe for US and Asian corporates
- In addition to these startups, London has a strong ecosystem of US corporates such as Coinbase and Circle Team as well as Asian companies like Huobi
- Kraken Exchange recently acquired CryptoFacilities making London one of its largest office outside of the US
- Most market makers and investment firms like Jump and CoinShares led by Daniel Masters are also based in London in order to be closer to their clients and partners
Investors: A growing investor landscape
- There are at least 5 crypto VCs in London including Cambrial Capital (crypto FoF), Libertus (Go Pamir and Max !), Fabric Ventures (One of the first Web 3.0 fund), KR1 (Listed crypto fund) and ConsenSys (Hi Min and Jeremy)
- On the other hand, most generalist funds have now dip their toes in blockchain: Accel (Chainalysis Team), Balderton Capital (Team Luno), Hummingbird Ventures (Argent, Libertus), Index Ventures (Argent, Xapo, BitPay), Entrepreneur First (Aztec, TokenAnalyst) or XTX Markets (Clearmatics)
