Seedsummit

For many years Seedsummit has been continuously impressed by the level of high quality business ideas and talented teams coming from Croatia. The startup scene has rapidly expanded and many companies are actively looking for funding. Seedcamp has invested in many Croatian companies (including Farmeron, Oradian, and TeddytheGuardian) and see Croatia as a flourishing startup ecosystem in Europe that will continue to grow.

Today Seedsummit are thrilled to announce the release the Croatian Seedsummit Termsheet as part of our ongoing Seedsummit initiative. From today, startups can download the Termsheet from the Seedsummit website it from here.

You can read the exclusive announcement on Netokracija here.

This addition marks the fifth jurisdiction in the Seedsummit Termsheet series, and the first in the CEE region.

Based on the widely used v2.0 General Seedsummit Termsheet, the document has been translated into Croatian and adapted where necessary to function within the Croatian legal jurisdiction while maintaining the spirit of Seedsummit initiative. The goal of this document, as with the other Seedsummit documents, is to make seed funding for both startups and investors easier to access, better to understand and fair for all parties.

“It will bring a much needed transparency to sometimes obfuscated startup funding scene locally,” said Matija Kopić, the founder of Fameron, a startup backed by Seedcamp from Osijek. “I hope it will also drive new investors i.e. wealthy individuals to start looking into this kind of investment mechanisms.”

The document takes into consideration various differences between English laws and Croatian. For example, the differing share structures-there can only be one class of shares in Croatia while England and Wales there can be different ones-so the doc is adapted to take that into consideration while staying in the spirit of the original doc.
We will work with local partners to do other CEE translations as to properly understand and take into account differing laws but we hope the document will be useful in Croatia for startups and investors and help develop further the CEE ecosystem in general.

We are looking forward to them being used, adapted, and spread. Likewise, we’d love to hear your thoughts about them, when you use them, and how they helped you take your companies forward.

Our group of partners are actively investing across UK, Germany, France, Israel, Ireland, Scandinavia, amongst many others, but we would love to have many more partners globally join our initiative. If you’re interested in becoming involved or would like to translate documents, please get in touch with info@seedcamp.com.

  zipA big thank you to the Law office Šarolić Robić and Marija Butković for translating the documents. We’re proud to have Croatian accelerator ZIP as a supporting organisation.

 

Praise for Seedsummit

“Having a standardized term-sheet is great step forward for the European start-up world. Any term sheet contains many complex legal constructs and for a first time entrepreneur negotiating these with an experienced VC the knowledge and experience gap means the odds are against the entrepreneur. A standardized term-sheet takes the industry a step closer towards a level playing field as even inexperienced founders will easily be able spot deviations from the standard and know where to focus their attention.” – Alexander Ljung, Soundcloud

“This is a great initiative. VCs can sometimes have an unfair information advantage over first-time entrepreneurs—particularly if there is no intermediary involved. Initiatives like this help to redress that imbalance. The simplest way to use the seedsummit template docs would simply be to do a compare-and-contrast against any termsheet you receive. Don’t feel shy about asking your potential investor to explain any and all variation – there may be excellent reasons for each variation, but make sure you have heard and understood them.” – Greg Marsh, One Fine Stay

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About Seedsummit

Founded in 2009, Seedsummit is group of over 25 leading investors who are working together to create transparency in the European startup ecosystem. By providing documents that range from a founders’ agreement to investment termsheets, we hope to help both seed stage investors and startups by allowing them to operate in a fast, fair, and affordable way.

 

 

As part of our new Advice from Founders video series, we’re pleased to share with you the second instalment. After focusing on what it’s like to be a Founder in our previous video, this time we’re talking about an issue that most startups worry about; fundraising. Whether it’s crowd sourced, seed raised, or borrowed from friends and family, raising the right amount of capital at the right time can be crucial to success.

As we know this issue is a contentious one, we asked some of our Founders to share their experiences. Here are 3 quotes from the video which you can watch below.
Fundraising

It’s important to build in small steps, but also demonstrate that you could become the biggest company in your industry

Customers

One of our staple customers, asos.com, we met at a Seedcamp event

Network

The network is the most important asset for an entrepreneur…at Brainient we’ve raised two rounds and in both cases the investors were part of the Seedcamp network

Business Development Associate 

The Job

About You

Bonus Points

To apply for the role please send an up-to-date copy of your CV with a short covering note to careers@seedcamp.com, before Wednesday 13th August.  Be sure to include links to your writing to show us how awesome a tech writer you are.

If you needed another reason to apply, here is a video of the Seedcamp team playing table tennis at a recent lunch.

This is a guest post written by Amir Chaudhry after he took part in Seedhack 5.0, our fifth hackathon. The theme was lifelogging, or quantified self, and after 48 hours of extreme hacking, Amir and his team were declared the overall winners for their calendar assistance app Clarity. Read on to find out about his experience, lessons learned, and the future of Clarity.

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in Seedhack 5.0, on the theme of life-logging. My team were overall winners with Clarity, our calendar assistant app. This post captures my experiences of what happened over the weekend, the process of how we built the app and the main things I learned. You’ll find out what Clarity is at the end — just like we did.

Meeting people and pitches on Friday

The weekend began with some information on the APIs available to us, which was followed by pizza and mingling with everyone. I spoke to a few people about what they were working on and the technologies they were used to. It was good to find a mixture of experience and I was specifically looking for folks with an interest in functional programming — that’s how I first met Vlad over Twitter.

Tweets with Vlad

After pizza, those people with ideas, even if not fully formed, were invited to share them with the room. I came in to Seedhack with specific thoughts on the kind of things I wanted to work on so I spoke about one of those.

Pitching Personal Clouds

I described the problem of silos, poor interoperability and how all the life-logging data should really be owned by the user. That would allow third parties to request access and provide way more value to users, while maintaining privacy and security. Building a centralised service makes a lot of sense in the first instance but what’s more disruptive than eschewing the current model of yet-another-silo and putting the user in control? If that sounds familiar, it’s because I’m trying to solve these problems already.

I’m working on a open source toolstack for building distributed systems that I call the MISO stack, which is analogous to the LAMP stack of old but is based on Mirage OS. With this stack, I’m putting together a system to help people create and run their own little piece of the cloud — Nymote. The introductory post and my post on ‘The Internet of my Things‘ has more detail on why I’m working on this.

For systems like this to be viable, we must be willing to trust them with the core applications of Email, Contacts and Calendar. Without advanced and robust options for running these, it’s unlikely that anyone (including me) would want to switch away from the current providers. Of these three applications, I decided to talk about the contact management solution, since I happen to have wireframes and thought it might be simpler to implement something over the weekend.

There was quite a bit of interest in the overall concept but what really piqued my curiosity was that someone else presented some thoughts around Calendars and analytics. After a brief chat, we decided to join forces and tackle the problems of Calendar management. The team had a great mix of experience from product to design and several of them had worked together before.

The Clarity Team

Amir – Product – Worked in several startups, product & programme management experience, currently a Post Doc at Cambridge University Computer Science dept.

River – Product – Programme Manager at Dotforge Accelerator and lead organiser of StartupBus UK 2014.

Mani – Developer – Freelance web dev (CMS and APIs), winner of multiple hackathons, currently studying at Sheffield University.

Vlad – Developer – Started programming long ago and attended many competitions and hackathons. Currently studying Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

João – Developer – PhD in Theoretical Physics, Python enthusiast and moving into data science, currently doing data analysis at Potential.

Jeremy – Designer – Freelance UI/UX Designer, hackathon enthusiast, currently studying medicine at Sheffield University.

Thick fog and ambiguity on Friday evening

We had all decided to work together and we knew it would be on the problem of calendar management and analytics. We were fired up but it quickly became obvious that was all we knew.

The next four to five hours were spent discussing the rough shape of what we were going to build, what specific problem we thought we were solving and whether there were enough people with such a problem to care.

We had a look at each other’s calendars and talked about how we each use them and the things we like and dislike about them. For example, I have around nine calendars and I curate them carefully, adding contextual information and sometimes even correcting old events to reflect what happened. We even bounced around the idea of the contact management app several times as well as a few other ideas that came up during the discussions.

These conversations took a while and it seemed like we were going around in circles. Despite this, it didn’t feel particularly frustrating. I realised that the same sticking point was coming up repeatedly because we were forcing ourselves to imagine a prototypical customer and the problems theymight have. This was never going to work since we wouldn’t have time to go and find such people and do basic customer development. Far better to constrain the problem to something weexperience so that we can look to ourselves for initial customer feedback. Once we did this, things seemed to go a little faster and taking breaks for food helped us keep our energy up.

Mani grabbing falafel for dinner

There were a few occasions where I looked around the room and saw other teams with their heads down, headphones in, and bashing away at keyboards — we hadn’t even figured out what we were doing yet. Despite this, it was a great exercise because it allowed all of us to get a feel for what aspects each of us cared about most and it helped us form some kind of shared language for the product.

The only outcome from this first evening was an outline but it was an important one. It distilled what we what we were going to work on and the components of it. We did this so we’d have a clear starting point the next morning and could get going quickly. Here’s a paraphrased version of what we sent ourselves.

Smart Calendar App.

We are collecting data from mobile and from desktop. 
- Mobile includes:
  - Call logs
  - Location (if we can)
  - Messages
  - What application is being used and when
- Desktop includes:
  - What application is active and timestamps of it
  - Location?
  - Git Logs ... ?
  - Taking logs of their existing calendars.

Working out what people are doing.
- Extrapolating info from active application (e.g browser page)

Present info back via calendar UI
- Need to turn all this information into webcal events

Useful info we want
- Time spent travelling (how much?)
- Time in meetings 
- Time on phone
- Who the meetings/calls were with
- Relevant docs/emails these are linked with
- Use labels

Then it was time for some late night snacks.

Midnight snacks

With one challenge out of the way, the next one was finding somewhere to sleep for a few hours (Campus was closing from 01:30). I had nothing planned but luckily for me, a couple of team members had booked a hotel room for the night. The minor complication was that we had to first find the hotel and then somehow get six people into a room meant for two — without the night manager kicking us out. That’s a whole other story, but it suffices to say that James Bond has nothing to worry about.

Rays of light and clearing haze on Saturday

After some card games and a few hours of sleep, we headed back to Campus and during this walk, we came up with ‘Clarity’ as the name of the application.

Once we arrived, development began. River volunteered his digital assets to the cause (i.e. his whole Google life). Mani worked on the Android app, Vlad on a Chrome extension with Joao pulling in the Google Apps data as well as combining it with data from the various platform apps. Jeremy worked on the front-end of the site, while River and I began wireframing the UI and user flow through the site.

Once the development was well underway, I realised how superfluous ‘the business guys’ can be. It would have been easy to simply sit there and let everyone get on with it but there were other things River and I did while developers were writing code.

Wireframing – We spent time thinking about what a user would actually see and engage with once they visited the Clarity site. We made a lot of sketches on paper and this was helpful because communication with the team was smoother with something to guide the discussion. It also helped to inform the design work and gave River and I something to show to potential users.

Talk to people – aka early customer development. We already knew that we were our own customers but it was useful to talk to other people for two reasons. Firstly, to get an idea of how they use their calendars and whether they have similar problems to us and secondly, to see what thoughts we prompt when we describe our solution (or show our wireframes). This led to useful information on how we should refine the product and and position ourselves against perceived competition.

Refine the product – Going through the wireframing and talking to people helped us come up with several new ideas for how to display the data back to users. Some of these seemed great at the time, but after showing some paper sketches to other people, we realised customers didn’t care about certain things, so we discarded them. Even though Jeremy had already done the work of putting together the UI for them (sorry, Jeremy!).

Examine the competition – After we described what we were working on. A few people mentioned potential competitors and asked how we were different. Initially, we didn’t know much about these companies but it was something we could explore while development was underway and consider our positioning.

Remind people to regroup – Every few hours, we would make sure everyone caught up with each other. We would check that things were going well, share what we’d learned from talking to people and discuss any technical problems and possible workarounds — including changing the scope of the product. The discussions we’d had on Friday meant that we spent less time debating when these questions came up during the weekend.

Work on the pitch – River and I began working on the pitch from just after Saturday lunchtime and kept building on it until Sunday afternoon. This, combined with showing our sketches to people, made it much easier to think about the story we wanted to tell the audience. In turn, that made it easier to think about the product development that had to be completed by Sunday. Especially in terms of a kick-ass demo.

Popcorn and candyfloss

Bright sunshine and achieving Clarity on Sunday afternoon

Development carried on through the night and we took a break to watch some sports via River’s laptop — at this point Clarity was actually logging this and other events. The next morning, we reiterated what we needed to get done for the demo and I was pretty ruthless about practising the pitch. River and I practised endlessly while everyone else made sure the the technical pieces were working smoothly. We had a lot of moving parts and making sure they were glued together seamlessly was important. At this point, we knew what Clarity was and how to tell its story.

Introducing Clarity

We all have calendars and we put a lot of time and effort into managing them but get very little back. A simple glance at your calendar for the past month will show you a sea of information with no idea where your time was actually spent. We believe your calendar should be working harder for you. Your calendar should give you clarity.

Calendar

Over the course of the weekend, we built tools that can go through your calendar and understand the events you’re involved in and tie them back to the relevant emails, documents and people. With a suite of software that spans across your GDrive, Chrome and Android, we’re able to combine your calendars with rich, contextual information so you can really understand what your time is being spent on.

Clarity summary view

We built this system and plugged it into River’s digital life. If we take a look at River’s summary for the last month, we see that he’s spent around 32 hours in meetings in London last month, despite living in Sheffield. We can also see that he’s spent an hour on the phone with someone called Lee, but that all of them were short calls. The next person also totalled an hour on the phone but only across 3 calls. Already, River has learned something about the the people he interacts with most and how. We can also drill down further and see all this activity presented in a calendar view, except this now represents where his time did go, rather than where he thought it went. For example, he’s most active via text message between 4pm and 5pm during the week, and we can see that he spent a few hours watching sports last night.

Clarity can do much more than provide an accurate retrospective view of your time. Since it interacts with all the important components of your life, like your phone and laptop, it can even perform helpful actions for you. For example, say I have a meeting set up with River but I want to reschedule it. I simply send a text to him as I normally would, suggesting that we move it to another day. Clarity can pick up that message and is smart enough to understand its intent, find the relevant calendar event and reschedule it automatically. River doesn’t have to lift a finger and his diary is always up to date. It’s easy to imagine a future where we might never have to add or edit events ourselves.

Clarity is a smart calendar assistant that understands the context around you, provides you with insight into your life and helps you seamlessly organise your future. You can find out more at http://clarityapp.me

Judging and announcements

After the pitches, we met a lot of people who had the same problems as we did with calendar management. Several offered to be beta testers. After waiting for the judges, prizes were announced and Clarity was declared the overall winner of Seedhack 5.0!

Things I learned

Looking back, there were a lot of things we did which I think helped us get to the winning slot, so I thought I’d summarise them here.

Think first – We spent time up front to define what we were going to work on. I thought this step was crucial as it meant we all understood the shape of the problem but also the areas that each of us were interested in. That helped later in the weekend as we could refer back to things we discussed on Friday.

Move fast – Once we did figure out what we were doing, then it was a matter of building the software to gather and crunch the data. A lot of this was done in parallel as Jeremy worked on the front-end UI while Mani, Joao and Vlad took care of the data aggregation, analytics and platform products. Don’t be afraid to throw away ideas if you find that they don’t work for people and remember it’s a hackathon (i.e gruesome hacks are the norm).

Remember the demo – At some point you’re going to be forced to stand up and talk about what you’ve done. We started thinking about this from Saturday lunchtime and sketched out the slides and the elements of the app we wanted to show. This helped inform the UI and technology that we were building and the pitch never felt like it was rushed.

Practice, practice, practice – we were told we’d have 3 minutes to pitch/demo and maybe a few additional questions. I made sure River and I practised repeatedly to get our time down to 3mins and ensure we getting across everything we wanted to. The important thing with such a short amount of time, is that we were forced to cut things out as well as ensure we emphasised the main points. It was a ruthless exercise in saying ‘no’. During the actual pitches, we realised everyone was taking longer (without repercussions), so I added an extra 30 seconds to cover the potential market sizes and business models.

Leave artefacts – After the pitches, we knew that we had to take the site down. It was built at high speed and in a way that ended up exposing someone’s data to the internet at large (thanks, River!). It might have  been somewhat easier to build something using faked data that we could happily share the URL to and leave online. On the other hand, our demo would not have been half as compelling if we weren’t running it real-time on live data.

Looking to the future

This is a product we all want to use and the team is interested in taking this forward. There are a lot of things to think about and many things we would build differently so we’re discussing the next steps. For example, there are likely ways to empower the end-users to control their data and give them more flexibility, even though the work at the hackathon was already quite impressive. Given how well Seedhack went, you might even see us at Seedcamp Week later in the year. If you think this is something you’d like to work on with us, do get in touch!

To wrap things up, here’s a victory selfie!

Victory Selfie

Thanks Amir and the rest of the Clarity team! We look forward to see what’s next for Clarity and hopefully we will see you at Seedcamp Week London in September. Here are their slides if you want to see how they pitched.

UPDATE: You can now see the full AMA here.


 

We’re holding an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit this Wednesday 23rd July 5pm BST and would love for you to join in the gif fun. We’ve been working with startups since 2007 and have learnt a thing or too about what it takes to build a successful business. We’ve been perfecting our 3 key areas of Networking, Learning and Capital and last week we announced our new $30m fund which will allow us to help startups scale up.

For over two hours we will be happy to answer questions ranging from MVPs to IPOs, seed funding versus crowd funding, the differences between the startup scene in Europe and America, and a whole lot more. If you’ve ever wanted to ask us about Seedcamp Week London, our Founders, or even what wearable Carlos favours the most, now’s your chance!

We’ll be tweeting the link at 4.30pm on Weds so be sure to follow us and make a note of it in your calendar.

The Narwhal Bacons at Midnight

 

 

This week we held a Meet & Greet at Campus London to welcome Founders who are keen to learn more about Seedcamp. After our exciting news, we were happy to answer any questions about the new fund, our application process, and Seedcamp Week London.

We had a panel with mentor representation from Ken Valledy and two Seedcamp companies; Traity and LineUp. Together with Reshma and Carlos the panel took questions from the audience and networked in the evening.

For those who were unable to come, here are the top 6 questions we were asked. We also have 3 more similar Meet & Greet events planned in Manchester, Bristol, and London so be sure to sign up if you want to come along.

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1. Is there a typical area Seedcamp focuses on, e.g FinTech/B2B/B2C?

Seedcamp’s investment thesis is based on supporting capital efficient businesses. As industries evolve they become more and more cost efficient to serve. Therefore our thesis evolves alongside the startups that rapidly disrupt, expand, and alter industries. Since 2007, we have invested and built expertise across different sectors, including SAAS, Fintech, Marketplaces, Analytics, Mobile, B2B and B2C. Through the years we’ve built a strong foundation around the Network, Learning, and Capital it takes to build industry winners.

Some of the newest areas we see a lot of operating efficiencies are Hardware, Health, and Education. We know we’ll keep adding to these sectors and hopefully you’ll demonstrate to us additional areas that will be disrupted by your startup.

2. Is there a certain amount of traction I need to have before applying?

Numbers can be misleading, especially when they are the sole proxy for demonstrating value. We are far more interested in seeing how you are creating value for your customers and providing a solution to a real problem.

Traction can be measured in many different ways and it can be a great way to prove that your startup has product market fit. However, it’s not the only indicator of a promising startup. Instead, we focus on whether you have a unique, highly differentiated idea created by an incredible team that has ambitions to scale to a billion dollar business. We look for curious and hungry founders who can envision and communicate a path to building world leading businesses.

ken small

3. Do I need an MVP/product or can I apply with nothing built?

Functioning prototypes make a difference. If we can see, use, and play with your product then we’re going to understand what it is you’re doing much quicker and we’re going to be able to assess your capability in building a final product your customers will one day love. Strictly speaking, you don’t need an MVP to apply for Seedcamp but proving you have customer interest is crucial.

4. What does the new fund mean for startups?

On Tuesday 15th July we announced our new $30m fund. For startups looking to join Seedcamp it means we can invest in more companies and continue to invest throughout the lifecycle of the company. You can see our standard deal terms here.

small5. How are you different to accelerators?

Over the last seven years we’ve focused on building the ultimate platform that provides Network, Learning and Capital for the duration of the company. Once you join the Seedcamp family it’s a lifelong relationship where we will support you from seed to IPO.

As we’ve been doing this since 2007 we are the most experienced and have the highest quality relationships that grow stronger every year. We are unique in Europe in having a US office which provides a bridge for us and our companies. Twice a year we take our startups to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, Seattle, and more to meet investors and companies. This has alone resulted in 33% of our companies having a US investor and 20% having an office in the US.

Ultimately, this means that unlike accelerators Seedcamp doesn’t end after 3 months or even a year. We’re here for the duration from start to success.

6. How many Seedcamp startups pivot?

We’re keen to support startups on the path of listening to what their customers and the market they are in is telling them. Our view is that they must do two things extremely well. They must be fast growing and they must be commercial (i.e. sell something someone wants). If that requires a pivot, we’re absolutely going to stand behind them for it and help them every step of the way.

In a sense, every startup that joins Seedcamp changes on some level, and there are many different levels of pivoting. We have had some drastic pivots but far more common is that a startup develops with the insight, advice, and mentorship they receive. You can read an interesting blog from Buffer on the ‘quiet pivot’ and from our own Satago on the ‘handbrake turn’.

Thanks to everyone @seedcamp for a great Meet & Greet this evening. Inspiration >> Application! pic.twitter.com/48j3UGDSdx

— Richard Lingard (@indibook) July 15, 2014


Applications are open for Seedcamp Week London until 17th August 2014, so be sure to apply soon. 

Seedcamp_NoBackground

Global investors from China, Russia, Europe and the Valley join forces to back ‘Seedcamp 2.0’ – a more extensive and ambitious approach to accelerating startups that will back 100 ventures over the next four years, with the aim of creating $1B businesses from across Europe.

An Experienced Fund

Seven years ago, we set up Seedcamp to invest cash into a handful of startups each year, and to bring European founders and mentors into a cohesive ecosystem where we could all meet online and offline. Our mission was to accelerate European startups and to build a European ecosystem.

At the time, people laughed at the idea of world class European startups, and the word ‘ecosystem’ was reserved for biology courses.

Now, with the same Seedcamp team having run more than 60 events involving 10,000 startups, 5,000 mentors, and helping scale 120 Seedcamp companies, it is time for us to lead Europe into the next stage. The standard approach to acceleration made sense when we started. Now the accelerator model needs evolution.

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An Acceleration Fund

Put simply, the game has changed. The problems that early accelerators, including Seedcamp, set out to address have either been resolved, or changed so much that a new solution is required. The ‘Art of the Start’ is now well honed in Europe.  The challenge now is to master the ‘Art of Scale’, not least because European entrepreneurs’ ambitions have outgrown traditional forms of acceleration.

In our experience, providing the first $75,000 investment and a three-month program to support the growth of a $10m business is not good enough anymore. Breakout success is all about scale and getting the $200,000, $2M, and $20M of investment that will help build a $1B business.

That’s why Seedcamp is building an evolution of our acceleration model fit for the next decade. We have raised a new fund, worth more than $30m,  that allows us to be much more ambitious about the way we support startups. We will now back companies from ‘start to scale’ because we’re bigger and better, allowing as to back more entrepreneurs, and at a faster pace.

 

A Networked Fund

And we won’t be doing this alone, our network is truly global. As one of our startups says, “there isn’t a senior person across the globe in a FTSE 100 or Fortune 500, or in the most dynamic startup, that we can’t reach”. This network of mentors and their playbooks prove transformative for our startups.

Our access to capital remains unmatched. Over 500 investors from the Sand Hill to Hong Kong have backed Seedcamp companies. Their quality and number keeps growing.

Our investor base is totally different to the one found in traditional venture. Every single LP we have is a key player in building multi-billion dollar businesses. Our angels have built companies including AVG, Skyscanner, Skype and Spotify. Our VCs (Index, Fidelity, Octopus and others) are backers of the likes of Spotify, JustEat, King, Zoopla and Dropbox. Our corporate backers are themselves huge successes – Yandex, DC Thomson, and Hays. The biggest LP in all of Europe, EIF, is also now an investor in Seedcamp. This is important because it will affect our founders profoundly. Having this kind of group backing Seedcamp means our companies have clear access to all stages of capital, from seed to IPO and M&A.

It is through these relationships that we’ve been able to transform the capital needs of our founders’ businesses.

A Transformative Fund

Seedcamp was the first accelerator outside the US to back start-ups at scale, often supporting completely unproven founders operating in unproven markets, from Slovenia to Romania, Portugal and Estonia. Of course, we also worked with those right in our backyards, in London, Paris and Berlin.

When we started, many first time founders in Europe had little opportunity for breakout success. But now there’s Zemanta (Bostjan and the new fund), Ubervu (sale to Hootsuite), myBuilder, and RMO. We also have category definers like Transferwise ($30M raised), GrabCAD ($15m raised), Profitero ($8m raised), Traity ($6M raised), EDITD ($6M raised), and Basekit ($25M raised).

We still fully believe in the first-time founder and the importance of backing them, and we will continue to accelerate these startups with pre-seed capital ($0-$75K) and access to the Seedcamp platform. With our larger fund now, our ability to deploy capital is four times as big. As a result, we will also be backing our alumni, mentors, investors, and a network of founders who want to accelerate their seed stage startups with next stage capital ($75K-$250K) and the Seedcamp platform.

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A Lifetime-membership Fund

And capital is not all a founder receives, we do not believe a “three months and you’re out” programme works anymore; Seedcamp provides a lifetime of support, not just for founders but for their senior team as well.

We operate across three pillars: Network, Learning, Capital – which we offer to Seedcampers from startup to IPO. Over the course of seven years of building Seedcamp , these three pillars have gone from strength-to-strength and continue to be used by startups that began with us in 2007 as well as those that joined us yesterday.

We’ve built our Network with the mindset towards connect Learning and Capital. With over 15K mentoring sessions held over the course of our last 7 years, we’ve facilitated over 60K connections between founders, corporates, product gurus, professional service providers, investors, and experienced serial entrepreneurs across the world. Access to our network is expansive and covers the global footprint from China through Europe across the US. Seedcamp has always been an immensely effective bridge to the US for European startups. As part of our efforts to continue to strengthen the US network therefore, Seedcamp will be opening a presence there in the Valley/San Francisco. The stronger US footprint comes as a result of seeing how the network has clearly had a material impact to the success of companies joining Seedcamp.

Learning is a continuous process… we know that half the battle early on in a company’s development is just having the right mindset and access to key learnings. With Seedcamp Academy, functioning similar to an MBA for Entrepreneurs, we provide just-in-time advice to all aspects of company development. Ranging from product to fundraising strategies, we’ve been able to help our founders hit product-market-fit faster and raise the necessary money to reach traction, growth, and scale. Accessing the Mentors through Academy means our Founders have access to the strategic and tactical playbook of the billion dollar club.

This combined access to key learnings and our network has resulted in outsize capital being raised by Seedcamp companies. 85% of our 120 companies raise the necessary funding from top tier investors across Europe and the US to scale their companies to the next stage. Along with the IPO and Exit track record of the Seedcamp LPs that are following-on in our companies, our startups continue to raise money from the best investors from Sand Hill Road and Manhattan to the West End and beyond! And with an average of $1.6M raised per company, there is no better place for the next 100 startups in Europe to raise the right amount of capital for their startups.

We’re often the only investor in startups’ pre-seed round who is also the first investor by the time they reach Series C or beyond. We stay close and advise as entrepreneurs’ needs change.

A New Kind of Fund

With our new fund, we’ll be in a position to provide more money, and at an earlier stage, because we are now four times bigger. We’re better because we have a higher quality of investors – both in our LP base and among our startups investors.  We’ll be getting deals done more quickly thanks to a standardised approach to legal documents and the streamlined process we have developed over the last seven years. And we’ll be supporting many more ventures: 100 startups in three years compared to 100 in six years under the old model.

We hope we’ll be a part of a movement that will completely change the venture acceleration business in Europe – from the kinds of entrepreneurs who get backing, to what a venture support platform means, down to who the LPs are.