Earlybird’s Year in Review 2022
2022 was a rollercoaster of a year but one with resilience despite turbulence: Portfolio company wins accompanied team and regional growth across Europe. We stayed grounded in our 25-year VC experience, supporting and expanding the portfolio, and adapting to complex market conditions. In this Annual Review, see diverse highlights from Earlybird’s family of funds — with a cautious optimism towards the future.
All for one, and one for all
At Earlybird Venture Capital, we have a distinct advantage that benefits Europe: a structure of decentralized and autonomous smaller entities, or distinct fund teams, to support innovation across the continent. This family of funds enables local teams — with proximity to ecosystems and entrepreneurs — agility and speed (plus careful due diligence) in decision-making.
It offers something else unique: the advantage of combining these local entities under one common roof, Earlybird. This means significantly more follow-on growth funding through our joint Growth Opportunities Fund. It means access to a broad and deep technical expertise & network across our much larger investment professional teams. It means better capabilities to build proprietary infrastructure for deal access by aligning brand synergies and developing in-house the AI-powered platform, EagleEye.
This year, the Earlybird family of funds announced 30 new investments across all funds and 52 follow-on rounds. Five more in stealth mode are still to come. 3 Unicorns emerged: Aiven and OneFootball from Earlybird Digital West, and Payhawk from Earlybird Digital East.
We grew office locations beyond Berlin, Istanbul, and Munich to now include Paris and London. This translates to more boots on the ground for French Tech as well as the thriving UK tech ecosystem. Having new nests across Europe means more contact with entrepreneurs who can tap into Earlybird resources across locations, stages, and industries while getting connected to the right teams.
As we build on our history and further evolve into a truly pan-European VC, meet the teams across the family of funds below. In 2022, we added 29 new members to Earlybird, meaning our international team is 81-people strong across Europe.
We are excited to share this recap which, despite times of immense geopolitical and market challenges, continues to demonstrate remarkable growth & wins.
Meet the Family of Funds 👋
Earlybird Digital East: Backing Success Stories out of CEE
2022 has been an excellent year for Earlybird Digital East. A year of good news, with successful exits, exciting portfolio developments, and promising new investments.
Payhawk, the all-in-one platform for company spend, was minted this year as the first Bulgarian unicorn. As the lead investor in Payhawk’s seed round in early 2020, we are proud to see Hristo and his team mark the largest Series B round by a CEE-born company with a $200m round (the second being UiPath, another Digital East portfolio company, also Romania’s first unicorn).
Another highlight of the year for us was the acquisition of Minit, the leading provider of process mining software, by Microsoft. Minit marks our second exit in the automation space after UiPath. Digital East has successfully exited half of the companies from the 2014 vintage fund portfolio.
Digital East has continued to invest in tech businesses born out of (or with ties to) Eastern Europe and Turkey. It was also an active year for us in terms of new investments. We have closed 6 new investments this year, in a wide range of tech verticals; across pre-seed, seed, and early stages:
- Midas is the pioneer mobile-first investing platform for emerging markets. Midas raised their $11m seed round, co-led by Spark Capital and Earlybird Digital East. You can learn more about Midas and our investment thesis here.
- Edge Delta is a leading edge observability platform to analyze data closer to the source. Earlybird Digital East has co-invested with Quiet Capital in their $63m round.
- We also made some pre-seed and seed stage investments this year: Pointee (SaaS/Automation), Sessions (SaaS/Productivity), Upstash (Infra SW/Developer Tools), and Goodlegal (SaaS/Legaltech)
Earlybird Digital West: Expanding across Europe
In 2022, multiple milestones drove tech innovation and commercialization. We closed our €350 M DWES VII Fund and opened locations in Paris and London. The Spanish market also became increasingly important for us in 2022, with a growing number of companies in FinTech, Enterprise Software, and DeepTech. We look forward to further expanding our footprint in Spain in 2023.
Highlighting only a few wins from such a wide-ranging portfolio is tough: OneFootball joined Aiven in the unicorn stable. Aiven redefined what crabs are capable of — raising €210M in a series D towards sustainable growth. Space tech Isar Aerospace won a European commission prize to make Lower Earth Orbit more accessible for data transfer and promote European sovereignty in launching rockets. MAYD got a healthy Series A and was recently voted as the number 2 startup to work at in Germany.
We kicked off the year backing energy tech Marvel Fusion. Other new investments include Paris-based food tech Gourmey — creating sustainable culinary-grade meats from real animal cells without sacrificing taste or harming animals. We got more active in the Nordics, backing female-founded Ripe which helps B2B SaaS companies thrive. We invested in B2B up-skilling edtech Junto and a next-gen platform Everstores, which acquires & scales small European-based D2C brands. Our new London-based fintech Payable builds modern infrastructure for moving money. To make access to VC Funds broader, we backed Tokenstreet, a startup out of Berlin-based Code University.
Naturally, our investment team evolved as well: We brought on new Partners Andre and Paul and Vincenzo, expanded the French team with Salomon, and the London team with Akash — celebrating the opening together with our growing UK community.
In Finance/Operations, we welcomed Nikola, Christina, Florian and Markus, with Christina and Nikola focusing on compliance. Stephanie joined our marketing and communications department. Under the leadership of Vincenzo, Elle and Anja bolster our pan-European Investor Relations mission out of London. Finally, our Engineering team welcomed three new-joiners Luca, Ludvig and Daniel to double down on our efforts of making VC more data-driven and eventually more efficient, effective and inclusive. This brings our Digital West team to over 40 professionals within the investment and operational functions.
Earlybird Health: Pioneering Patient Outcomes
In April 2022, we announced the first closing of the Health II Fund. As the only digital health fund supported by public payors, we are proud to continue our relationship with the public insurer Barmer and kick off one with IKK Classic.
Following the investment rationale of backing best-in-class companies with significant patient outcomes, our first Health II Fund investment was co-leading the €80M Series C of ImCheck Therapeutics, a French-based immunotherapeutic biotech addressing the gaps in existing therapies for solid and hematological tumors, with treatment potential for infectious and autoimmune diseases.
On the portfolio level, Oculis will go public via a SPAC and iSTAR Medical entered a strategic alliance with Abbvie. Financing highlights include Perfuze €22.5M Series A, wellabe €2.75M Series A+, and Noscendo Series B. On the clinical side, Arga is undergoing first-in-human and Priothera reports promising data.
Throughout the year, we increased our outreach and engagement. Thom discussed investing in digital health and MedTech; Christoph reflected on psychedelics treatments and shared his view on two digital health startups; Rabab was featured as a European TechBio investor and wrote with Florent about Gene and Cell Therapy.
We also prioritized our ESG efforts, being an Article 8 fund and a Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) signatory. We kicked off the popular series Digital Health Cocktail Hours with AWS, AI Campus Berlin, BIH Charité, and GE Healthcare. Do not miss out on fast-paced networking intros and content panels — the next edition is on January 18, 2023!
While expanding our horizons, the Health Team grew: we welcomed Florent as Partner, Laurent and Henry as Venture Partners, David as Financial Controller, Susann as Executive Assistant, and Elena as Assistant Communications & ESG Manager.
Earlybird-X: Uni Tech Transfer & Early Ideas in Western Europe
At Earlybird-X, we’ve kept focused on boosting Europe via transferring technology and specifically deep tech out of universities and backing companies at the earliest stages — including those beyond the typical, big DACH cities. Since launching the fund in late 2021, this year we’ve gone on to invest in teams solving industry pain points with technology: Matchory (supply chain innovation) and PlanerAI (fighting food waste through AI-based predictions). PlanerAI was recently recognized by the German AI prize for their contribution to a better planet. In a co-investment with Earlybird Digital West on eleQtron, we are excited to back the future leaders in quantum computing, bringing high-quality qubits from the lab into real-world applications.
Our teammates were active as advisors, speakers, and startup jury competition members across Germany and beyond, especially on deep tech topics. Natalia shared her insights on why Tech Transfer is critical and we are happy to now have Moritz splitting time between the Berlin and London offices as a touchpoint to founders in both cities. Stay tuned for more news in Q1 of next year!
Earlybird Vision Lab: Backing Migrant Entrepreneurs in Germany
Vision Lab is a 6-month program from Earlybird and our friends at Bain & Company that offers startup teams in Germany of migrant backgrounds, access to mentorship, funding and networking. Vision Lab is supported by Handelsblatt alongside many active partnerships. It is an incubator and impact fund, which recently had its first closing! We are the first German VC to have created such a dedicated program and fund and welcome others to be part of this important movement.
In September 2022, we kicked off the 3rd cohort of Vision Lab. Having increased our program’s startup cohort count to now 10, we have 100% migrant-founded startups from 12 countries here in Germany, with 50% female participation. One of those teams is Faircado who recently announced their pre-seed round.
We continue to announce each team individually on our social media channels, so stay tuned to meet them all there. Angel investors and pre-seed funds from our community: save the date to be a part of Demo Day on March 31, 2023.
Events that Engage; Content that Connects
As the pandemic showed signs of slowing this year, our teammates traveled across Europe to exchange ideas, present tips, mentor, give keynotes, serve on expert juries, meet Founders, and make new connections.
Of course, we headed to Slush, Web Summit, LSI Europe, 0100 Conference, and Frontiers Health. Across Germany, we attended events like Slush’D or WeAreDevelopers and co-hosted well-attended Female Founder & Investor events in Berlin and Munich, (like this & this) plus online mentoring.
We gathered our portfolio companies at our Annual Limited Partner meeting where they could exchange best practices directly with each other.
To reach new audiences, Earlybird Digital West contributed our thoughts to Germany’s women’s leading business publication, STRIVE Magazine. We launched our own English-language podcast, the Earlybird Podcast to feature portfolio companies, and ecosystem guests. Publishing over 30 Medium articles, we shared cross-team knowledge on our Earlybird’s View, including deep dives on why we invested, analysis, trends, and even comms tips for startups.
For 2023, we already have a number of new stories lined up involving key investment areas like AI, food tech and climate tech — areas where technology can be scaled to create real impact. We are excited to share those with you. We post news, content, and event opportunities on the Earlybird channels, LinkedIn and Twitter. Join us!
If you are looking for new professional challenges, visit the jobs board with a range of opportunities across our portfolio companies. We would love to welcome you to the #EBVCgang. Thank you for being part of our community and have a great start in 2023.
Before we wrap this year, we take a moment to honor someone who connected us all: Earlybird Co-Founder and Partner, Rolf Mathies. In November 2022, Rolf sadly passed away, leaving behind a big legacy to uphold.
As we shared on Linkedin, Rolf was a change maker, relentlessly driving things forward, a team player, promoting the greater good, a mentor and coach, caring about who and what he was engaged with, combining understatement with maximum impact, and above all, the best friend anyone could have.
Thank you, Rolf. You are greatly missed.
