Introducing the Flywheel — the ultimate Seed VC database for Europe
Introducing the Flywheel
The Flywheel is a tool for founders to expand their horizons beyond the local firms that they know and get more investors into their fundraising pipeline. Because there are actually lots of (newer) firms that you probably don’t know which are more relevant to you than the ones who have been operating in London, Paris, or Berlin for the last 20 years.
The challenge of finding relevant seed investors can be made more difficult by geography. Regions like Belgium, Austria, Portugal, the Baltics and Eastern Europe are still vastly underserved by venture capital.
Here’s how Flywheel works.
We’ve built a curated list of active VCs in European Seed rounds. You can sort the list using three criteria: Geographies (Benelux, Nordics, Eastern Europe & Baltics, etc.); Backgrounds (US firm, Pan-European, Local); and Affinity, if you’re looking for someone who does pre-seed, tech bio (note: not biotech), or Deeptech.
So, for instance, if you pick Nordics/Pre-Seed/Pan European VC you’ll get a list of 35 firms. That includes Seed major LocalGlobal whose bio in Flywheel will tell you that the firm has done 108 deals since 2013, and that 73% of their pre-2018 investments went on to raise a Series A. Or, if you select Tech Bio/DACH, you’ll meet the very new and interesting specialist player Air Street Capital and learn that it invests in “AI-first technology and life science companies” and has done 5 announced Seed deals since it launched in 2020.
Over time, we’re hoping to build out those Affinity categories to add such specialties as gaming, space tech, or Web3 to help founders identify the right firms, as most VCs still don’t stray outside “normal” SaaS and FinTech.
Data dramas
To build these profiles, we started with Crunchbase data. The problem, however, is that a lot of firms don’t “genuinely” report their seed investments. Some firms would only report Seed investments after they have raised a Series A (unsurprisingly, a number of multi-stage investors do this 🙂), which heavily skews their performance metrics in their favor. So we augmented that data with our own internal intelligence, insights from our community, and a bit of sleuthing. For the past several weeks, we’ve been beta-testing Flywheel with 70 collaborators, and we’re thrilled with the initial response.
Along the way, Flywheel has given us some fascinating insight into the European seed market over the 2014–2022 period:
- 241 funds are active at the seed stage: aka did a seed or pre-seed in Europe in the last 2 years
- Average Pre-Seed deal size: $1.2 million based on 1,672 deals.
- Average Seed round is $4.5 million based on 10k deals.
- Average Series A is $22 million, based on 6,900 deal. BUT: Median Series A is $11.5 million.
- Ratio of startups that raised a Seed round and graduated to Series A: 50%
(Note: The data runs through 2022 but does not include yet 2023 — expect lower numbers in the future)
How to get access
Want access to the Flywheel? Just contact us to get an access code —tbh if you’re a little on the engineering side you can also simply figure it out, *wink*.
With great power comes great responsibility: to reach these investors, you can’t just spam out dozens of emails that are not personalized (→ 100% does not convert). You want to take the time to find the right firm and the right way to get an introduction. And the way to do that is to research what deals people have done to get a sense of whether they know your industry and business model. For more tips, you can see my fundraising guide here.
This is a long journey, and you’ll want someone relevant to you, your business, who will spar with you and challenge you. It’s very different to be the lead investor of a deep tech company where you have to be patient and the lead investor of a B2C fintech where you want to see PMF signs and iterate super quickly and grow super quickly.
TLDR: enjoy — send us feedback, and raise a great seed round.
Marie
ps: the Flywheel is brought to you by Fly Ventures. We are a first-check VC backing technical founders solving hard problems. Like autonomous driving or securing LLMs.
pps: as confident as we are in this first version of Flywheel, it is of course not perfect. So we’re launching an open call to all VCs listed to contact us and to help build a more complete data set and profile around their page: you can take ownership of your firms data here.
