Weekly update #40
Welcome to this edition of the weekly newsletter. The idea behind this activity is to gather all the information in the startup ecosystem in one place, with a special focus on the fintech market.
Before jumping to the main topics for this week, I am exploring partnerships with the newsletter. So this edition is sponsored by Notion, which is offering a 6-months free plan of its plus product to all founders submitting an application for their startups program.
In order to redeem the free trial, submit an application using this link https://ntn.so/michelemattei, select Michele Mattei as partner and include the following partner key: STARTUP4110P62416. I really hope it will be helpful for many founders out there!
Coming back to us, I’ve been reading a very interesting report this week, the “Data-Driven VC Landscape 2024” by Data-Driven VC . The report wanted to get a clear overview of the current state of data-driven VCs in the market, trying to understand main trends, market expectations and returns globally. Here my main takeaways:
Let’s start from the returns. It’s not a surprise maybe, but half of the investments made by VCs worldwide return less than the money deployed. A good 35% of them return between 1-2x, with only 10% giving back between 2-3x the investment made. A very small 5% of the total startups backed return more than 3x, mostly covering for the part of the portfolio that has been a writeoff.
In terms of funding, I believe it is not a surprise that the US are on top of that ranking, bringing home $3.8 billion every 1M people, approximately 52x more what LATAM is doing right now. Europe stands approximately at ? of that amount, with still a long way to go.
Something very interesting was the fund proportion ranked by different metrics. My favorite one: more than 75% of VCs out there have less than 5 engineers as employees, with less than 10% having 11 or more. The main question that pops in my mind is how are they going to perform a good technical due diligence then? Something very interesting to notice also, is the fund proportion by AUM, where you can notice that while smaller funds are still the majority, bigger funds are not that far behind. Recently I was reading another report that was mentioning how smaller funds are more likely to have bigger returns, going in the opposite direction of this statistic.?
Last but not least, maybe the most interesting point of them all. 75% of the VCs believe that Augmented VC will be the winning model of the future, with 12% of them believing there will be no space for humans in the VC industry of tomorrow. Augmented VC is a model that believes that the investment decision should be taken only based on data, with humans only involved in the loop.
You can find the full report here if you want to deep dive.?
Before jumping to the latest news, a quick request from my side. I will start a small series of podcasts to interview fintech founders and VC managers active in the ecosystem. If you want to be part of it, feel free to drop me a line on Linkedin!
Anyway we saw some very interesting news in the market this week. Bending Spoons completed another great acquisition, buying WeTransfer , while Stripe acquired the payment provider Lemon Squeezy , and the egyptian fintech MNT-Halan acquired Tam Finans . In the payment world, Pix will be integrated in 谷歌 Wallet in Brasil, while Aufinity Group | bezahl.de closed a partnership with Stellantis . In the VC industry, we saw Kennet Partners closing a $266 million VI fund, and Siddhi Capital securing $135 million for its second fund, while Bill Gates’s backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures raised $839 million. In the italian market, Qonto has been imposed a temporary blocking order from Banca d'Italia - Eurosistema while Azimut Group invested $105 million through a club deal in Alps Blockchain . Finally, we saw some very interesting funding rounds from some fintech startups like Mighty Partners , TigerBeetle , Zolve , Aveni , Rillet , MYNE , Leanpay , Crediko , and many others.
But let's take a closer look at the main news of the last seven days:
Closed deals
Insights on the VC industry
News on the market
A special look in the Italian market
And here some useful resources for everyone involved in the ecosystem:
Events you don’t want to miss
You have a cool event you want to mention or to sponsor? Feel free to send me a DM.
Startups raising funds
Take also a look at the last edition of the newsletter, Weekly update #39