Budapest Letters #18
👋 Hi All! Great to have you back. This is Budapest Letters, my newsletter covering startup and small business stories from the CEE region, or interesting developments that might have something to do with this part of Europe. Hope you will enjoy it!
Before we jump into edition #18, big shout out to our new subscribers, good to have you here. And one more thing before we roll, if you like what you read, subscribe + share 🙏
Cheers, Aron
📢 TL;DR
Top stories this week: ✍️ Revaia, a women-founded VC firm from 🇫🇷, raised a whopping €250 million growth fund ✍️ AhoyConnect, SalesOn and Kernolab raised 💵 ✍️ Enso and Archbee are the newest entries into Y Combinator from the CEE region, the famed startup incubator from 🇺🇸 ✍️ The Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2021 includes several CEE cities in its Top100 emerging list
🔥 Story of the Week
Revaia (formerly known as Gaia Capital Partners), a Paris-based VC firm founded by Elina Berrebi and Alice Albizzati, raised a €250 million growth fund, making it by far the biggest female-lead venture fund in Europe. Huge achievement!
But this is especially big news, considering the fact how under represented are women in the VC industry; although the same is true for finance, in general 😢
However, on a positive note, with know Revaia and last weeks news of Crowberry Capital (raised a €90 million fund), another female-lead VC firm, women are slowely taking their rightful place at the table. Where they should be.
Of course, the road is still long and bumpy, but it seems we are getting there.
PS: Additional positive news re: this topic, that I almost forgot, is Female Invest reaching the latest batch of Y Combinator (S21). A startup from 🇩🇰 , Femal Invest is making investments more accessible for women via online learning and building a community 👌
Show Me Da 💶
👏 AhoyConnect, a data intelligence startup from 🇨🇿, bagged €3 million, led by Inovo Ventures (🇵🇱) and Kaya (🇨🇿), two well established CEE VC firms. The company, which gives an overview of a respective business’s own community via data integration, aims to use the fresh money for international expansion.
👏 SalesOn, a sales development startup from 🇵🇱, received €900k, led by Next Road Ventures, a local VC fund. According to the company the money will be used… yep, you guessed it… strengthening its tech and international growth.
FYI: Ewa Chronowska, from Next Road Ventures, besides being among the handful of female VC partners in Europe, is also founder of CEEBAN (!)
👏 Kernolab, a BaaS startup from 🇱🇹, nabbed ca. €855k, led by Lighthouse Ventures, a respected VC firm from 🇨🇿; intra-CEE financing going strong this week, as you see 💪 The companies vision, btw, is to provide a bridge for businesses of any size to launch their own, dedicated financial products.
Congrats to all teams!
🚨 Startup Alert
This weeks alert is focusing on not one but two2 up-and-coming startups from the region that both successfully made the latest batch of Y Combinator, the famed US startup incumbator. Firstly, Archbee from 🇷🇴, a startup that provides a cool tool for product documentations and organizing stuff connected to this aim.
The company was founded by Dragos Bulugean in 2019, still, it managed to make YC this year, plus it raised $1M (ca. €855k) not so long ago from Inovo Ventures.
And secondly there is Enso from 🇵🇱, which at first I though of as a ramen bar, but it is instead a superb no-code interactive ELT (Extract, Load, Transform process) and data-driven process automation tool. The up-until-now bootstrapped company was founded in 2018 by Wojciech Danilo and Sylwia Brodacka.
🧠 Food
Startup Genome, in partnership with the Global Entrepreneurship Network, published its annual Global Startup Ecosystem Report (GSER). According to its makers, the GSER is “the world’s most comprehensive and widely-read research on startups with 280 entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems and 3 million startups analyzed. The report includes a ranking of the leading 140 ecosystems, breakdowns by continent with regional insights, and founder-focused articles from thought leaders and experts.” So it is a pretty important analyses and benchmark for the global startup industry.
For me though, the main focus is obviously how the CEE region faired. In terms of the number of top global startup hubs, not so well. But this is sadly unsuprising considering that Europe (17%) is trailing both North America (50%) and Asia (27%) in this race, by wide margins; nonetheless, it is good to underline that couple of European startup capitals (e.g. Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm) are booming, even versus global competition + the old continent is producing unicorns like crazy.
However, in terms of global emerging hubs, the CEE stat looks 🔥 🔥 🔥
Mumbai (🇮🇳) was once again crowned #1 as it outperformed all other cities in performance, funding, experience, and talent (main KPIs of GSER); BUT
Estonia (🇪🇪), coming in at #14 in 2020, tied the #5 spot this year with Barcelona and Madrid (🇪🇸); sure, the former is a country whereas the latter two are cities within a country, but both BCN and Madrid has a larger population than Estonia so nobody can and should complain. Big win!
Other CEE cities/countries in this list: Lithuania (#31-40), Bucharest (#31-40), Warsaw (#41-50), Krakow (#71-80), Prague (#91-100); with Bucharest, additionally, having the 2nd most valuable hub ($35 bln).