Europe11 Investor Month Recap

What we learned from our biggest ever fundraising cycle

Last week concluded the first official Investor Month at Entrepreneur First in Europe. This four week effort aimed to maximize the exposure between our Europe11 cohort and the wider investment community. While we’ve run investor office hours for several cycles now, this cohort saw an order of magnitude increase in size, scale and complexity. Europe11 was the largest cohort in EF history at 29 teams and the first “full scale” cohort comprising of three sites (London, Berlin and our newest site, Paris).

Facilitating this many teams in this many locations required a drastic overhaul of our planning and process. By pre-booking investors and structuring time into fixed, 30 minute chunks we were able to provide significantly more exposure than ever before. Even with these changes and maxing out our office space, we still required a full four weeks. (Plus I really liked the Investor Month moniker that I shameless stole from Rodrigo Mallo Leiva of RebelBio.)

Europe11 Investor Month calendar

What we did

Over four weeks we hosted 120 funds for 688 face-to-face meetings in three cities! Over the summer we pre-booked each investor to join us in one of our EF offices for either a half day or full day session, where they would see 6 or 12 teams respectively. Many funds requested extra sessions so the average teams/fund was 6.76.

From the founder perspective investor interest varied as was expected. Still we saw an average initial meeting count of 23.74 per company, which is at least a 4x improvement over when I joined EF in 2016. I should note that these numbers only reflect the investor meetings that took place “in our four walls”. A good number of funds/angels across Europe and the US showed interest in the cohort but were not able to join us for Investor Month so we instead made direct introductions.

Perhaps more impressive than quantity was investor quality. As you can see in the image above, we enjoyed participation from the very best venture funds and angel investors in London, Berlin and Paris. We’ve learned time and time again that one of the best predictors in company success leaving the Launch programme is the quality of investors a team can get on their cap table.

“Being first time founders in a very early company stage (e.g. pre-product, pre-revenue), many investors are quite skeptical about you — especially in Germany and in the slow moving, complex space of Industry 4.0. However, EF’s investor month changed our momentum. After Demo Day, we had so many great and genuinely excited VCs in our pipeline (that contacted us, not vice versa), that it was us who could decide which investors to speak to and which not.

This ultimately enabled us to raise a seed round in a relatively short period of time, with a relatively high valuation, from the best investors across Europe. My co-founder and I would have never expected this to happen, and EF deserves most of the credits for it.” — Europe11 Founder

What we learned

1. Investors are cross-border curious: A core belief of Launch is that the best founders deserve the best capital. Geographic border be damned! It’s for that reason we structured Investor Month in the staggered approach you see above. We wanted to mitigate the risk of investors or founders not being able to sit down face-to-face due to scheduling conflicts. In this approach, any investor taking part in Investor Month had the opportunity to meet with any team from the cohort, regardless of home city. Overall we saw a healthy mix of geographic investor appetite. Berlin investors led the way with an average “non-local” selection ratio of 71% (i.e. they saw teams from London or Paris). London followed with a 31% ratio and Paris with 25%. This analysis is partially flawed in that we have 2x the number of teams from London vs. our other locations, but directionally it is positive to see such cross-border interest.
2. Seed is still local: While still early in the fundraising cycle we do see a strong preference for backing teams in home markets. VCs and angels alike all aspire to be high conviction, value add investors and at the seed stage that tends to be heavily dependent on relationship. Since forming and managing relationships are far far easier with the benefits of proximity, this preference for local investing comes as no surprise. What’s comforting and exciting is the willingness of many investors to mitigate this risk by co-investing. We’re seeing a record number of co-lead deals on the table and expect that to continue. Entrepreneur First is in a great position to help connect like-minded investors and would welcome any opportunity to help build a stronger and more collaborative Europe venture ecosystem.
3. Thematic office hours are a big hit: Europe11 features a very large number of life science companies, more than ever before. To support those teams and their unique fundraising needs, we spun up a Life Science Office Hours Day in Paris in late April. This was an enormous hit for investors and founders alike. We’ll likely roll out more of these in the next cycle to create a more effective and efficient experience for all.

What comes next

We still have several weeks before we can full take stock of this cohort’s fundraising cycle, but early indicators suggest that Investor Month is coming back. I would expect we’ll do a bit less on the “single city” approach and run more cities in parallel to increase our investor capacity. At the same time we’ll likely increase the number of sector-focused days in cities to enable strong connections. Our immediate focus will remain with supporting our Europe11 companies close their rounds, but early planning for Europe12 is already underway. Pre-booking for the next cycle’s Investor Month will kick off in late July so investors….watch your inbox!

Executing such a multi-variable operation is no small task and we would not have been successful if it wasn’t for the tireless effort of my team. Thank you to Caroline McGrath, Ferdinando Sigona, Ana Lucia Buckman, Dominik Diak and Pippy James for making this incredibly complex effort into a well-oiled machine.