In August, the volume of invested venture capital in Europe saw a 39% decrease compared to July, according to Crunchbase data. The total of invested volume reached $3.1 billion, spread across 205 funding rounds.
Number and volume of announced funding rounds over the past 12 months*
- Number of funding rounds
- Invested volume in $bn
Leader Industries and Investors
According to the number of conducted investments, the software startups lead the market with a total of 48 investments. IT startups secured the second spot and the AI trend persists, with 25 investments being made in AI startups this month, thus capturing the spot of third most invested industry.
Now, regarding the companies behind the investments, Cedars-Sinai Accelerator and SmiLe Inject Capital emerged this month as the most active venture capital investors, completing 3 deals each.
The second place is shared by Enterprise Ireland and Archie, with 2 closed deals each.
Top 10 Industries of Financed Startups
- Software
- IT
- AI
- Health Care
- BioTech
- Financial Services
- FinTech
- SaaS
- Manufacturing
- Medical
Top 5 Investors with the highest number of deals
- Cedars-Sinai Accelerator
- SmiLe Inject Capital
- Archie
- Enterprise Ireland
- SRP
Notable funding rounds across Europe
In August, the largest funding round was a $120 million Venture Round secured by CloudPay, a cloud-based payroll, treasury, and on-demand pay solutions provider. The company was founded in 1996 in Andover (UK).
While Seed Rounds accounted for the majority of investment rounds, making up approximately 42% of the total, the highest investment volume was seen in Venture Rounds, which accounted for $361 million across 44 deals.
The largest Seed Round was secured by Black Forest Labs, which raised $30.2 million. Founded in Freiburg in 2024, Invert develops advanced generative deep learning models for images and videos.
Number and total volume of financing rounds per stage
- Number of funding rounds per stage
- Volume of financing rounds per stage in $mn
Detailed overview by stage
European VC Industry Hotspots
In August, London remains the hotspot of the European VC industry, with Berlin securing the second spot.
As in the previous months, the UK led the way with the most investment rounds at 106, followed by Germany with 27 and Switzerland with 19.
When ranked by investment volume rather than the number of investments, Andover (UK) places 3rd with $120 million invested.
PE Acquisitions Overview
Private Equity (PE) acquisitions increased in August by 131% to 37 compared to August 2023. Of those 37 acquisitions, 11 included companies based in the UK, followed by Germany and Switzerland with 5 each.
With the increase in PE acquisitions, their share as part of the total 242 investment rounds in August (VC + PE) increases to 15%, marking the highest share in the last 12 months.
The largest known acquisition was New York-based alternative asset firm Stonepeak’s acquisition of London-based euNetworks, a provider of bandwidth infra-structure services for $2.1 billion.
- % of all investment rounds
- Number of PE acquisitions
*All data from CrunchBase, as of September 3, 2024.
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