European innovation financing reached new heights in 2017 with close to $17 billion raised by tech businesses and an increasing number of “mega-deals”.
Clipperton, in partnership with Digimind, releases its European Innovation Financing report covering the full year 2017.
Click here to download the report: Clipperton’s European Innovation Financing Report 2017
Key highlights of this study are:
- Record vintage in 2017 with 16.7B$ invested in European tech in 2017, a 38% annual growth.
- Performance is once again driven by very large rounds (>100m$) concentrated in the UK and Germany.
- Early-stage investments have slowed down in H2, potentially the first signs of an entry into a new cycle.
- Handful of landmark deals and a strong activity in Deep Tech, New Hardware and Mobility Tech: the eco-system is (slowly) moving towards fundamental innovation.
Thibaut Revel, Partner at Clipperton, wrote:
The full year data of 2017 disclose a record with c. $17B invested in European tech companies, and more importantly an impressive growth rate compared to 2016 (almost 40%). The obvious question comes: do we stand at the peak of the cycle and will 2018 be the start of the decline?
A few indicators in our H2 2017 report support the bear case:
- the growth is really linked to a small number of ‘mega-financings’ on UK (and a few German) companies;
- France and the Nordics experienced a flattish second semester;
- and last – maybe the most striking fact – early stage activity is slowing down across the board with a drop in the volume of VC-backed A-rounds.
While top deals in value are still dominated by marketplaces, fintech and food delivery, it is worth pointing out that there is an increasing number of sizable rounds in segments with strong technology content: in AI obviously but also in electronics (e.g. GraphCore) or in automotive / mobility tech (Lilium, Volocopter, Vulog…).
For more information, please contact:
- Thibaut Revel, Partner, trevel@clipperton.net
- Martin Vielle, Vice-President, mvielle@clipperton.net
About Clipperton
Clipperton is a European independent corporate finance advisory firm exclusively dedicated to the Technology space, advising innovative companies on M&A transactions, debt financings and equity offerings. With offices in London, Berlin, and Paris and an international reach, Clipperton is a European leader in Technology financial advisory. Over the past 15 years, the team has successfully completed more than 200 high profile transactions globally.
About Digimind and WhoGotFunded.com
Digimind is a SaaS intelligence software company based in Paris, Boston and Singapore, providing advanced information management platforms and technologies that perform massive data collection, automatic intelligence extraction and visualisation. Using its unique web mining expertise, Digimind developed WhoGotFunded.com, the world’s most comprehensive funding database, discovering over 100 fresh funding deals every day in real time all across the world.