Who won the 2021 Euro ̶F̶o̶o̶t̶b̶a̶l̶l̶ Fintech league? ⚽🔮
So far, 2021 has been a crazy record year fundraising-wise for tech companies — especially fintech. And last week, just after the favorites France and Germany both got kicked out of the UEFA Euro, we asked our LinkedIn community which country won the Euro fintech league. Here are the answers we got from the survey:
It seems our community is very much aware of the 315 fintech deals which closed during H1 2021. In total, those fintechs raised no less than €10.7bn! And there were pretty accurate guesses!
🥁 Here is the final ranking
The UK is our European champion, both in terms of deals number (103) and amount raised (€4,828m). Yep, that’s a lot…
- Second place goes to France in terms of number of deals, with 68 deals recorded; and to Germany in value, with €2,098m raised.
- Third place goes to Germany in number of deals with 45 rounds closed; but if talk amount raised, Sweden makes it to the podium with €1,416m raised. Well, this number is actually biased and linked to Klarna’s mega-rounds, accounting for 2/3 of the total amount.
A few comments on the above ranking ⬆️
First, despite Brexit, UK still leads the European landscape. (I guess we’ll soon find out if that applies to football as well. Stay tuned folks!) and it’s not really surprising. The UK fintech hub remains very attractive, thanks to:
- A very start-up-friendly regulatory environment, with the FCA supporting support innovation. We’ll see how this evolves and if a combination of a UK and an EU license with the setup of a mainland entity can work out well in the long term.
- Availability of capital, with London remaining home (or second home) of all the major European and North American VC and PE funds. On that note, we may have an announcement soon, stay tuned…
- Availability of talents, with London being a leading European financial for decades. We’ll see how this will evolve as a majority of the firms are now moving operations and employees in EU state members.
- A fintech ready market, allowing for one the highest fintech adoption rates globally.
Second, France has had an amazing semester, with lots of rounds announced as well. On average, there were mostly earlier-stage deals, which explains why France is in front of Germany in number of deals but not in amount raised. That being said, France has welcomed 3 Fintech unicorns in 2021 (Alan, Shift Technology and Ledger), and there definitely are some good candidates to join this list and grow France’s share in amount raised over the next few quarters. We think about our portfolio gem Agicap, which recently raised $100m, but also Qonto — whose last fundraising reached €104m in January 2020, or even Payfit with total fundings of $200m.
More generally, we see a concentration of mega deals, with market-leading companies emerging and clear sector winners. The top 10 deals in H1 represented €5bn vs €1.4bn in 2020 and €1.8bn in 2019. We’re acknowledging some covid impact, but still, that’s a (very) big increase. We’ve talked about Klarna earlier, but we can also name Mollie or Wefox mega-rounds! (Can’t wait for Revolut’s one later this year. Bets on amount and valuation are both open!)
Sectorwise, Banktech still drives most of the deals — both in number and value.
H1 2021 numbers also confirm the huge hype around payments, with Mollie, Klarna, or checkout.com mega deals accounting for most of the invested €. Probably thanks to COVID-19 and the surge in online payments, the ultimate size of the market, and well, … very high multiples.
Insurtech has also seen a surge in investments this semester, with some major deals such as German Wefox, British Bought by Many, or our very own French Akur8.
Last but not least, Investment Banking has been highly considered by investors this semester. Our take is that as the crypto market is getting more and more structured and institutionalized, infrastructure players such as exchange platforms, market makers, custodians, and frankly anything that will help this asset class to be traded by institutional investors will start to attract some capital. Our recent investment in the crypto lender Tesseract speaks for itself, but we can also name Ledger’s recent substantial round.
A final congrats to this semester’s biggest fundraisers ⬇️
At the pace the Fintech ecosystem is growing, we can’t wait to report for H2 2021. The financial sector landscape is changing, and there’s so much more to be done! Exciting times!
