Meet VCs investing in European SaaS
by Pauline Tordeur
When seeking for the top VCs investing in SaaS, the usual names are Bessemer Ventures, Matrix Partners, Scale Ventures Partners…
Try to guess what these firms have in common? None of them has offices in our “old” but “techy” Europe 😱.
Yet, one of the things that makes SaaS beautiful and so challenging is that SaaS products can be scaled globally, and from anywhere in the world. Thus, SaaS startups can raise funds outside of the US — an opportunity that some European VC funds got right.
As we create 3 to 4 SaaS startups in our great startup studio based in Europe and manage SaaSClub from Paris, we decided to make a series of interviews of the most well-known SaaS investors on our blog.
We already interviewed 6 VCs that invested in these European SaaS companies:
European SaaS is booming 🚀
This is not a hook sentence. There are multiple arguments for this.
#1 — We believe there are huge opportunities to build SaaS in Europe as 25% of Western Europe companies are using cloud services, while it’s 50% in the US. For sure, Europe will keep up the pace and close this gap in the next years.
#2 — Contrary to what people usually think, the European B2B market is NOT small. There are close to 20 million SMBs in Europe while there are 25 million in the US. In other words, for a SaaS business, Europe is full of prospects and potentialities!
#3 — The valuation of the SaaS market worldwide is expected to grow from $25B in 2014 to $165B in 2022 — and what’s clear to us is that Europe will stay in the game and increase its shares in this global market.
Top highlights of European SaaS in 2015🌟
2015 has been a great year for European SaaS: ¼ of the 90 European startups that raised more than $20 million are cloud-based software companies. Here are some of the top highlights of this past year:
- in March, British FinancialForce raised $110M to Capitalize on Cloud ERP Growth;
- in May, French Algolia raised $18M to go international and hire top talents for their Paris/San Francisco offices & the Spanish company JobandTalent raised €23M;
- in July, Mailjet (French) raised €10M and celebrated impressive milestones: 75% customer growth and 15 billion emails sent;
- in September, the Greek company Workable raised $27M, French PeopleDoc raised $28M from top investors (we will interview them 😏), the Belgian company Collibra raised $23M and French iAdvize raised €14M;
- in October, Zendesk acquired the French SaaS company Bime for $45M, French Talentsoft raised €25M and French (again!) Doctolib raised $20M.
The list could be longer but let’s talk about what’s happening tomorrow: we will publish our very first interview of great SaaS investors. A small clue to guess who the interviewee is: the man is a former Bessemer Ventures’ partner.
[UPDATE: we’ve published 9 interviews:
- Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel Partners
- Christoph Janz, Managing Partner at Point Nine
- Nicolas Debock, Investor at Balderton Capital
- Raffi Kamber, Partner at Alven Capital
- Jason Lemkin, an American VC investing in European SaaS
- Ari Helgason from Dawn Capital
- Audrey Soussan, Principal at Ventech
- Jos White, Partner at Notion Capital
- Alex Kayyal, Europe Head at Salesforce Ventures]
Would you be interested in actually meeting the biggest European SaaS investors say at conference? If yes, leave us your email address here.
