We’re sure you’ll agree, every year seems to pass by more and more quickly! 2014 was no exception, so let’s take a breath… step back… and take stock of what our incredible family of startups achieved in that time.
36 STARTUPS JOINED SEEDCAMP
The office is busy as ever as no less than 36 startups joined Seedcamp this year! We love it, and so do our startups; we’re often told how much being in such a close environment with other startups helps facilitate knowledge-sharing and self-development. It’s great to see our strong close-knit family grow even stronger.
The 36 startups span a variety of sectors and while our investment criteria is largely industry-agnostic, it’s interesting to see both Cloud/Saas and Marketplaces grabbing our attention this year; a fair reflection of wider industry trends.
We’ve been particularly interested in supporting the growing eastern-European startup ecosystem, so we’re really pleased to welcome some great startups from those regions this year including Branchtrack, Farmhopping, and GoWorkaBit. In 2014 our investments spanned 13 European countries (and beyond).
Female founders now account for 22% of our startups, which is slightly up on last year. But while any increase is positive, we’d still like to see many more female founders join the Seedcamp family.
3 STARTUPS WERE ACQUIRED
It’s a tremendous achievement to be acquired; it’s the culmination of years of dedication and hard work for all involved. So we were super thrilled when UberVU, Compilr and GrabCAD were acquired by three top tech companies during 2014.
23 STARTUPS JOINED OUR US TRIP
Twice a year we visit the US with some of our startups to meet, pitch and learn from the top tech companies and investors on both sides of country. This year’s trips were a huge success and our thanks goes out to Dropbox, Google, Square, Stripe, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and many many more (wish we could list you all!)
MEANWHILE, BACK AT HQ…
As for us, we raised a new $30m fund that allows us to back 100 new ventures over the next four years, hosted 25 events across 19 countries, and brought in 6 incredible new team members. It was a blast.
To all the startups working hard every day to make a difference, we hope 2014 was a great year for you and that 2015 is even better! Perhaps we’ll even meet you at one of our events. Have a great new year!
