Kima Ventures 2017 Recap

This is an email we sent out to the Kima portfolio founders to recap 2017 and introduce the new companies in the portfolio.

Dear Kima founders,

Last year was another very busy year for the Kima portfolio and team, keeping up the pace of 2 new investments per week, so we wanted to briefly update you on everything that happened in 2017.

💯 new seed investments!

Since the start of 2017, we have closed 100 new seed investments that we’d like to welcome to the Kima family.

A few metrics (for 01/2017–12/2017):

• New startups invested in: 100
• Average amount invested per company: $164k (94 of the 100 investments were between $100k and $200k)
• Total new investments: $16.4m
• Source of investments: 22 investor referrals, 20 from accelerators/incubators (8 The Family, 3 Y Combinator, 2 eFounders), 20 inbound, 17 angel referrals, 9 founder referrals, 4 outbound, 4 fundraisers, 2 portfolio spin-offs, 1 application and 1 direct connection
• New startups that applied for funding on our website: 2,241
• Location of new investments: 60 France, 24 US, 9 UK, 3 Germany, 1 Canada, 1 Hungary, 1 Lithuania, 1 Luxembourg
• Average number of founders per company: 2.38 (14 x 1 founder, 43 x 2 founders, 33 x 3 founders, 10 x 4 founders)
• New investments with female founders: 27%, including 15% as CEO (vs. 19% and 6% in 2016)
• B2B vs B2C: 52 B2C and 48 B2B
• Investment type: 65 equity investments and 35 convertible note investments (16 SAFEs, 16 custom notes and 3 AIRs)
• Currency of investment: 61 EUR, 29 USD, 9 GBP, 1 CAD
• Average round size participated in: $1.7m (min $175k, max $15m)
• Average pre-money equity valuation: $6.5m (min $1.1m, max $39m)
• Average convertible note cap: $8m (min $2.5m, max $35m)
• Average dilution of the total round: 18.6% (min 2%, max 35%)
• Kima’s average stake after round: 3.1% (min 0.37%, max 10%)

You can compare to last year’s numbers here.

Any other metrics you’re interested in? Just let us know.

Team update

As already announced, after 4.5 years Vincent will be moving on from Kima to work on something new. He’ll continue to advise the Kima team and be available to the portfolio companies whenever needed. We’d like to thank him all he’s done over the last years and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavours.

After catching our attention with her Venture Slam and joining us for 6 months earlier in the year, Eléonore is now back at Kima and we’d like to welcome her to the team.

We’d also like to thank Pierre who spent 6 months with us this year helping evaluate new companies and supporting the portfolio with Forward. He’s now joined Kima company Comet, you can read more about his experience interviewing with startups here.

Investment focus; Seed and Series A

As a quick reminder; we’re still investing $100k to $200k per company, from seed to Series A, anywhere in the world. We continue to look for the best technology founders regardless of the sector or geography they are in. We also have no limitations in terms of a maximum round size or valuation.

Some of the best founders we’ve backed have been introduced to us by other founders so please do continue referring them to us, we’re always happy to connect with anyone that you recommend; simply email anyone on our team directly or point them towards our website. Thanks!

Notable portfolio events in 2017

It’s been another great year for the Kima family which now counts nearly 600 startups in 30 different countries. Here’s some highlights from the year:

Exits were announced including that Zenly joined Snap, Pumpkin joined Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, Recast.ai joined SAP, vBrand joined Nielsen, Modria joined Tyler Technologies, eWings joined Hogg Robinson Group, Hivy joined Managed by Q, Boatbound joined Boatsetter, TrackDuck joined InVision, MyCrowd joined QASource and Gitter joined GitLab.

Large funding rounds were announced including TransferWise ($280m), Ledger ($70m), Front ($66m), Younited Credit ($48m), Leanplum ($47m), Carta ($42m), Tulip Retail ($40m), iAdvize (€32m), Boom ($33m), Heetch ($32m), Frontier Car Group ($22m), Wibbitz ($20m), Convargo ($19m), Verve ($18.5m), Meero (€15m), Payfit (€14m), Pilot ($17m), AB Tasty ($17m), CareDox ($16m), PandaDoc ($15m), Akeneo ($13m), Halo Neuroscience ($13m), TheGuarantors ($12m), Dispatch ($12m), BetterDoctor ($11m), Curve ($10m), Allomedia (€8m), Virtuo (€7.5m), Agricool ($9m), Clustree ($8m), Reach Robotics ($7.5m), Foxintelligence (€6m), LogDNA ($7m), Roadster ($7m), Oddup ($6m), Cora ($6m), Side ($6m), Sawyer ($6m), CAILabs (€5m) and many more smaller rounds.

More quick Kima news you might have missed

• Station F: after the grand-opening in June (even Macron was there), the Kima team moved into our new home in the world’s biggest startup campus at Station F in Paris, joining the 3,000 founders and 26 startup programs on site.
• Kima Circles: 2017 saw the launch of our in-person event series with four Paris-based events on the subjects of Marketplaces, Mobile, Recruitment (w/ Mobiskill) and Sales bringing together founders to discuss around common issues and share their best practices. We’ll be expanding this in 2018.
• Kima Forward: our portfolio platform, Forward, keeps growing with lots of new content, 112 perks, 30 experts and 29 service providers now available. We’re still onboarding more and more companies as we speak.
• New logo: we (again) updated our logo and website, the new one has been designed by Grégoire, you can read about his process here.
• Reporting: now that we’re closing in on 600 companies. we launched a new tool to keep track of all of your company updates, please use your [email] address for any updates you send us (this tool has even been open-sourced here).
• Yearly accounting: to make things easier for you (and for us), we’ve also now launched an automated tool to confirm our accounts at the end of the year from which you would have received an email recently asking you to confirm that our records are correct. We received a 50% response rate in 24 hours, thanks for your help with this!
• More content: Alexis wrote about the importance of leaver clauses and Jean has been a roll, writing about people, VC, building teams and many more.

As always, please do reach out if you have any questions or there’s anything that we can help with and we look forward to your updates and referrals in 2018.

Thanks and kind regards,

The Kima Ventures team
Alexis, Eléonore, Jean, Rose and Vincent