A Quieter Start to European Funding in 2021
Plenty on the horizon and a new section covering Venture Capital Fund announcements.
Good morning and Happy New Year!
2021 is the third year in which Seed Weekly has been published, so that’s an exciting achievement. Thank you to everyone for your support and attention - it is really appreciated.
A bit of a shorter edition this time round, depsite there being quite a lot announced over the last couple of weeks.
The UK is no longer part of the EU, something that has felt simultaneously dragged-out and sudden as of late. It will be a while before we can understand the impact on Entrepreneurship and early-stage funding, but the UK always had a headstart on the rest of Europe.
More established funds weren’t seemingly announcing rounds and a lot of sub-$1m fundriases were done regionally (see Hiventures activity in Hungary).
I would expect to see a real uptick in deal announcements over the coming weeks as the European startup and investor community begins to thaw out following a brief winter hibernation.
This week we saw fewer UK deals than usual too, but one standout round saw Hoxton Ventures lead Peptone’s $2.5m Seed Round - a company on a mission to completely automated protein drug engineering.
I will also be adding in European VC news, to keep you updated on the latest Fund Accouncements and news worth knowing.
🇪🇺 European VC News
LAUNCHub Venutres Announces first close on its new fund - Exciting news for founders across Central and Eastern Europe and Bulgaria specifically.
Delivery Hero launches venture capital fund DX Ventures to drive innovation in food, delivery and beyond. Another specialist fund with some
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Raised: $8.3m (Seed)
Description: Xampla is a University of Cambridge spin-out and they create plant protein material for commercial use, in order to replace microplastics and single-use plastics.
Investors: Horizons Ventures.
Raised: $2.71m (Seed)
Description: NearSt is a retail technology company building a comprehensive source of real-time local inventory. It enables people looking for products online to send them to retailers stores. NearSt integrates automatically with existing stock-keeping systems.
Investors: YYX Capital, True Global Ventures and others.
Raised: $2.44m (Seed)
Description: Peptone is a Molecular Computational Physics company that is focusing on bringing to the market an AI-orchestrated operating system for completely automated protein drug engineering.
Investors: Hoxton Ventures, Founders Factory, Brent Hoberman and others.
🇭🇺 Hungary
Raised: $7m (Seed)
Description: Turbine's platform understands the inner mechanisms of cancer enabling the discovery of novel targets & precision medicinal therapies.
Investors: Accel, Atlantic Labs, Boston Millennia Partners and others.
🇧🇪 Belgium
Raised: $3.65m (Seed)
Description: InvestSuite is a global fintech providing automated investment solutions to financial institutions of all sizes.
Investors: PMV and others.
🇫🇮 Finland
Raised: $2.46m (Seed)
Description: IPRally is an easy-to-use web application, powered by AI knowledge graph technology to serve patents by providing an AI that thinks like a patent professional.
Investors: Icebraker.vc, Spintop Ventures and Join Capital.
🇪🇪 Estonia
Raised: $1.5m (Seed)
Description: Rendin is a long-term home renting service that replaces security deposits and guarantees rental income.
Investors: Startup Wise Guys, Atomico, Tera Ventures, Trusight Ventures and others.