European & Israeli Venture Data 2018
A data-driven look at VC investment trends across the geography.
I’m thrilled to release my bi-annual data deck on European and Israeli venture investment for 2018. The deck is 83-pages. Get it while it’s hot. You can view and download the deck at Slideshare and/or view the whole thing embedded below at the end of this post. For a note on why and how I do this, read this.
For this report, I had the benefit of the help of Andrew Poesaste (@poetential), an intern. Thank you, Andrew!
A quick note: My data is focused on sectors and geographies where I am active. It, therefore, excludes life sciences (pharma and therapeutics) but includes digital health and healthcare IT. My data is limited to Western, Central, and Eastern Europe and Israel. It excludes Turkey, Ukraine, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
A few observations and takeaways:
Overall, 2018 was a record year for European & Israeli venture capital, with over $25B invested across the region. The number of deals was down slightly.
Mega-deals (over $100M) continued to take place with regularity, but all round brackets showed increases.
Average round sizes were up slightly.
Israel continues to outperform the rest of Europe (and the US) on a dollars per capita basis. Note that the y-axis below is a log scale…
The leader table:
In terms of VC dollars as a percentage of GDP, Estonia exceeded Israel, taking first place in 2018:
The five largest VC markets in the region all experienced growth during the period:
US VC participation is trending slightly down:
Israel leads in US VC participation by a wide margin:
The UK, France, Benelux, and Israel are skewing towards enterprise:
Fintech remains disproportionately the most commonly invested vertical in the region:
There have been some dramatic shifts in VC attention:
Here’s a quick snapshot of the top ten segments across the top ten countries in the region — think of it as a “cheat sheet” as to what’s getting funded where:
Both the UK and Germany are highly focussed on fintech:
Israel remains extremely (and problematically, in my view) skewed towards security:
An overview of venture activity in the Nordics:
Energy is up:
IT infrastructure is down:
There’s much more in the actual slide deck, so check it out on Slideshare, or below:
Angular Ventures is a specialist early-stage VC fund backing enterprise technology founders from Europe and Israel. If are you building technology for the enterprise, please let us know.
For an overview of key news in the enterprise tech space in Europe, Israel, and around the world, subscribe to our weekly enterprise tech newsletter here.
