Two good stories with lots of information about the volume of Internet venture investing in Europe during last year.
— The first one is about European Web 2.0 investment last year. More than $285 million was raised in Europe across seed and first rounds in 2006 by 54 European Web2.0 companies. This does not include the 16 “undisclosed investment” rounds. This compares to $47.5 million in 2005. Also, Index Ventures is the most active VC fund, followed by others like Benchmark, Accel and Atlas Ventures. Also, the whole list of investment…a good and useful repository.
— Then a story from FT, which works off the data compiled by the post above. Some additional quotes and thoughts: Some VCs complain that Europe creates too many me-too versions of successful US start-ups. For example StudiVZ, which was recently bought by Holtzbrinck, the German publishing group, has been criticized for being simply a German version of the Facebook student social networking site. However, Danny Rimer, partner at Index Ventures, said Europe had a great deal of original engineering talent. “Because there isn’t a hub for development in Europe like Silicon Valley or Route 128 in the US, there is more original thought. Last FM, for example, were able to create a truly unique music service because no-one knew what these guys were up to”, Rimer said.
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