Top deals seen in Central and Eastern Europe in April
Here is my list of some interesting deals from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), seen in April. Often overlooked by big US and Western European investors, the region offers many good deals, often at much cheaper valuations.
I interviewed Dörte Höppner, the boss of European Venture Capital Association (EVCA) … Read it HERE.
BlaBlaCar, the world’s largest long-distance ridesharing community, announced the acquisition of carpooling.com, the second-largest service in Europe, as well as Hungary-based Autohop. It will integrate the businesses into its existing service to create a unified ridesharing experience across Europe, from Amsterdam to Zagreb, becoming one of the largest sharing economy platforms in the world. BlaBlaCar has money for more acquisitions. Stay tuned ….
Credo Ventures, the Prague-based VC targeting the CEE region, has closed its second fund, which, at €34 million, is more than twice that of the firm’s original €18 million fund launched in 2010. Credo 1 has made a total of 16 investments in Central Europe. The VC tends to co-invest with other funds, and these have thus far included Seedcamp, TechStars, Index, Arts Alliance, hub:raum, Atlas, Flybridge, Baseline amongst others.In contrast to the majority of local VCs in the region who in part invest public, largely EU, money, Credo Ventures’ LPs are entirely private, TechCrunch reports.
Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman has founded investment firm LetterOne Technology, which is to invest $16 billion in European and American companies.
Invesdor, a fast growing Nordic crowdfunding platform, has been granted a MiFID licence by financial authorities, to expand debt and equity crowdfunding services across all 31 EU and EEA countries. The Helsinki-based crowdfunding platform is the first one to receive this level of operational licence, part of the European Commission’s drive to harmonise financial regulations across Europe. Invesdor is also playing with “pre-IPO” deals and raising itself money to boost the platform’s international growth.
Fintech startups are hot and it is good to see that some great innovative projects disrupting the finance industry get funded. The Berlin based fintech startup NUMBER26, that offers “the bank account of the future” just completed series A with 10 mln EUR funding. The US investor Peter Thiel’s VC fund Valar Ventures leads the round. The Swiss entrepreneur Daniel S. Aegerter is also joining this round. He led his startup TRADEX to one of the largest software exits of all time ($ 5.6 bn). The existing investors Earlybird and Redalpine complete the round. Valar expands its portfolio with only its second Fintech investment in Europe. After having invested in the London based Transferwise, Valar Ventures further emphasizes their dedication for the disruption of the traditional financial industry.
Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has invested $15 million in Israeli music startup Music Messenger.
Russian Skolkovo Foundation and Chinese investment group Cybernaut have agreed tolaunch a $200 million joint VC fund.
Tech.eu, published a report zooming in on all the mergers, acquisitions and IPOs in the European tech industry that happened in 2014. Here are a few key take-aways of the research:
- Only 4.75% of European tech company exits in 2014 were initial public offerings (IPOs)
- The most popular vertical for exits was ‘Enterprise SaaS’, followed by ‘Adtech’, ‘Gaming’, ‘Security’ and ‘E-commerce’
- B2B rules in Europe: only about 40% of exited companies operate a B2C model
- A lot of the major deals were a result of consolidation in the telco/ISP space (SFR, Ziggo, ONO etc.) but a number of ‘digital IPOs also stood out (namely King, Markit, Rocket Internet, Zalando, Just Eat and Zoopla)
- Just over one-third of all European tech companies with an exit in 2014 were funded by venture capital firms
- Germany saw the most ‘domestic’ company exits in Europe, but the UK had significantly more major ‘home runs’
- Approximately 37% of all acquisitions of European tech firms were made by a US-based company (122 vs. 40 for #2 on the list, Germany)
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