The European Investment Scene
Our learnings from Slush 2018
Slush is the world’s leading startup event, with over 20,000 attendees each year. This month our blog, alongside NatWest, covers key insight and learnings from the team at Capital Enterprise following their time at the Slush Conference 2018.
Building a Diverse Ecosystem
Julia Rabin, Green Light Programme Manager at Capital Enterprise
Capital Enterprise has long been committed to improving levels of diversity in the tech startup ecosystem, formalising these efforts last year with the launch of our OneTech programme. It was therefore heartening when we went to Slush to see that the rest of the tech world is also putting their full support behind this movement.
This year Capital Enterprise attended three days of Slush, including the Investor Day held at Clarion Hotel Helsinki on Monday 3rd December before the full event on Tuesday and Wednesday. This was not just a fantastic opportunity to connect with investors from both home and abroad, the afternoon consisted of a number of roundtables covering some of the questions faced by the investment world today, including how to best support sectors ranging from DeepTech to Proptech to Edtech, that ever pertinent question of if/how VCs and corporates can create value-driven relationships, and the rewards of impact investment. A running theme across the discussions had by both our UCL colleagues and us was the value added to any portfolio by a diverse range of teams both in focus and, crucially, in the founders we support.
Jump to the main event and as usual the conference kicked off with Atomico releasing their annual report which also focused on the need to improve industry-wide diversity levels. They quoted the now familiar, though no less shocking, figures that show only 7% of all European VC funding went to female or mixed gender teams last year adding that 46% of women say they have experienced discrimination at some point working for their startup.
At the same time 75% of those surveyed felt the culture at their startup was inclusive leading us to ask which parts of the ecosystem as a whole can we to address so everyone can feel included? Hopefully the work done by Capital Enterprise and our OneTech partners can go some way towards addressing this.
Speaking of OneTech partners it was great to see Diversity VC’s Check Warner on the founder stage discussing how we can build a more inclusive industry with Atomico’s Niklas Zenström, just a few hours before Arlan Hamilton told the story behind Backstage Capital, ‘the most talked about VC of 2018’. At the Q&A session afterwards she talked about the importance of surrounding yourself with supportive individuals and shared stories of the occasions when she was overlooked by people at events who might not have known who she was or how she could support them — an experience we’re sure many people can relate to from their own professional lives.
Between the many talks, panels, and individual discussions that took place over the conference it was clear that 2018 really was the year that the ecosystem woke up to the desperate need to champion diverse talent across all areas. To quote our favourite social critics Timon and Pumba, this ain’t no passin’ craze.
We need to build an inclusive and supportive diverse industry, and we needed to do it yesterday.
Investment Scene at Slush
Nick Slater, Principal at AI Seed Fund
Firstly, I’d like to highlight some of the great startups we met at Slush and who we feel are ones to watch:
Hedvig: Transforming Home Insurance
With the latest technologies, Hedvig is tearing up old business models to build the insurance solution of the future. Hedvig allows its customers to sign up using a chatbot, and uses machine learning to help process claims faster and with lower fraud rate.
In 2018 Hedvig was named as one of the hottest startups in Stockholm by Wired UK.
Logical Clocks: Hyperscale Data Science on Hadoop
Logical Clocks AB are the makers of Hopsworks and Hops Hadoop. They provide Enterprise support for the open-source Hopsworks platform to solve the data problem for Deep Learning and AI.
Logical Clocks are a portfolio startup of AI Seed, a VC fund managed by Capital Enterprise.
Mojo Diagnostics: Tackling Male Fertility issues
Mojo Diagnostics are embracing current challenges in male fertility treatment, to bring male fertility diagnostics — and eventually treatment — to a new level.
They are already working with several renown fertility clinics in Europe to advance humanity’s knowledge about sperm and how it impacts ART (Assisted Reproduction Technique) outcomes.
Meeshkan: Building Data Science through Slack
Meeshkan is an app that allows data science teams to train, test, and deploy machine learning models faster. All of this is possible through a reactive interface powered by Slack. Meeshkan is free and can be installed into a Slack workspace in less than a minute.
Meeshkan was announced as the winner of Slush 100 on the Founder Stage during the Slush 2018 conference.
In addition to meeting tonnes of startups at Slush, another benefit is to catch up and talk tech with European VCs I either haven’t come across before, or haven’t caught up with since the last Slush.
What I found interesting this year is that a lot of the investors I spoke to had a bigger focus on deep tech, and didn’t have to see significant revenue or customer traction before investing. Investors such as Inventure and Project A seem to be looking earlier to capture these deep tech companies before they build out their technology and their valuation sky rockets.
I also discovered the rise of corporate ventures. With the boom in tech there seems to be a steady rise in corporate ventures, and I met the newly launched 1689 Ventures, (Husqvarna) Stihl Digital, Fluxunit (Osram) and more. I was pleasantly surprised by the ability for a lot of these corporate venture funds to invest without having to go through a long bureaucratic back and forth with the head organisation.
Take this all with a pinch of salt as I went to Slush representing AI Seed, a seed stage AI first investment fund, and so the conversations I had could have easily been clouded by the fact that I am clearly a deep tech advocate.
However, it does look like deep tech is on the rise throughout Europe and the corporates are getting involved too.
Special thanks to Julia Rabin and Nick Slater
