European VC Investors Cheatsheet
Who is investing in what? (🤔 maybe also in hard times)
As a Data Analyst at K Fund I’ve spent last two weeks studying COVID-19 possible scenarios, economic disruptions and forecasting with those assumptions in mind. For an entrepreneur, the situation would be really different depending in your industry, your valuation, unit economics and cash. But I’m sure you’ve already read it. You’ve probably also read that Investors will be more risk adverse and that there will be less capital in the market for fundraising.
But luckily, the job of an investor is to invest. All those VCs that have an open fund will continue investing. Maybe you’ll need to have better unit economics or decrease your valuation a bit. Maybe also the process will be longer. But all is not lost.
I can say that you don’t have to be scared at all because companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack or Whatsapp were founded during the Great Recession and succeeded, but that would be survival bias. However, all of them have in common that they grew and raised funds in hard times. That’s the thing we want to help you with: raising funds.
In hard times you have to be as efficient as possible. For that reason we’ve created a couple of tools to help you out:
- EU Investors Cheatsheet on Notion: a tool to look for VC Investors based on what Industries they have already invested in. Here.
- EU Investors Cheatsheet posters: top 300 Investors and top 150 Industries more active visualizations, to see the whole picture. Here for Seed and here for Series A.
The data source is Crunchbase rounds from 2015 to 2019 and from European VCs to European Companies. In the Notion you only need to search by industry and fund type. In the cheatsheet posters just follow the lines to find the most active investors in the sectors you are in.
Try EU Investors Cheatsheet on Notion
The database is 28% Seed deals, 24% Series A deals, 20% Unknown Series, 13% Series B, 8% Series C+ and 7% Other types (Angel deals, Grants, Venture Debt, Secondary Market,…).
You can for example look for “software” and all companies in software and enterprise software will appear. You can also add the type of round and the country to search for it. For example look for “insurance seed” will return all seed deals in insurance and “insurance seed spain” all seed deals in insurance in spain.
The database is fast to query because it’s really diverse: more than 700 different Investors and more than 600 different Industries in almost 40.000 rows. But for the same reason we’ve also created two pages at the beginning containing all Investors and Company Industries. For example, for “health” there are: Health Care, Health Insurance, Health Diagnostics, Personal Health, mHealth… If your company is doing health maybe you would like to look for all of these different terms.
You can also look specifically for Investors and see who are the most active in your country or city.
Try it and see if it works for you! 👇
Take a look at EU Investors Cheatsheet posters
700 investors and 600 industries are too much to get the whole picture because, like pareto rule, a 20% usually does the 80% of the job. For that reason we’ve created two posters with the top 300 VCs and top 150 industries more actives in those 5 past years. The visualization is a catscatter inspired by the book Knowledge is Beautiful where you can spend time following the lines like if it where a Where’s Wally? puzzle. There’s one for Seed deals and other for Series A because they represent more than a half of the database.
👉 Click here to download the Seed Cheatsheet and here to download the Series A Cheatsheet.
Share your thoughts in the comments! 🤗
