I keep meaning to write a post and share insight on the FAQ of Seedcamp results. It is difficult to distill 3.5 years of hard work and hundreds of relationships built, but we have been keeping quiet too long. We’ve done surveys, analyzed the status of the 500+ mentored companies across the 34 Seedcamp events, and have a lot of data on our 40 Seedcamp companies (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011). Today should be a good start to opening up much of the intelligence already known to our investors.
In short, we’ve succeeded very well on a large part of our mission. We wanted to help establish Europe as a great place to start-up a world-beating business. Europe has become so attractive that we see a swell of local incubators, government focus on entrepreneurship, nearly an event a day, and more venture capital available for startups. Europe is on its way to being a much better place to start-up than in 2007.
As to the question of whether Seedcamp has succeeded, we’ll let you be the judge. In a part of the world considered to be behind the US by at least a decade, a place where it’s notoriously difficult to raise money from risk averse investors, and where there isn’t much M&A love… we challenge this conventional wisdom!
Here are some numbers and facts about Seedcamp companies and their success in the marketplace.
How many companies are we talking about, anyways?
- Annually, Seedcamp sees over 2000 companies applying to the 11 events across EMEA.
- 10% of these companies (220) are provided active mentoring from the 1200 mentors in the Seedcamp network.
- 10% of these (15-20) now receive Seedcamp investment and 1-year long support, with a particular emphasis on active mentoring in the first 3 months post receiving Seedcamp funding.
How are the Seedcamp companies funded?
- There were 22 Seedcamp companies from 2007-2009 from 17 different countries and 18 more since September 2010 adding a 19th country.
- Of the 22 companies in which €1.1M was invested by Seedcamp, 90% raised follow-on funding roughly between €300K and €2M in the next round.
- Overall they’ve raised €30M+, which means these companies have raised 27x what was invested just 3.5 years ago.
- In 80% of the cases, at least 1 Seedcamp investor has followed-on into a company.
- 2 of the companies have shut down.
- 3 have been acquired. Mobclix was acquired for $50M within 2 years of participating in Seedcamp. Talasim is now a part of Jeeran. Toksta was acquired by Mainseek.
So how is it going on the operational side for these companies?
- Of the 17 companies that are alive and independent from Seedcamp Fund I, all have a product launched and all except 1 are generating Revenue.
- 7 of these companies will generate more than $1M in Revenue by end of 2011. That’s nearly 1/3 of all companies in which we invested. Many of the others are buiding up to this level and a few are just getting to the repeatable, scaleable sales model.
- The companies have over 300 employees now versus when they came to Seedcamp they were often 2 people per company. That’s a growth of 6x on average over 3 years.
Seedcamp is all about it’s network – are there some numbers on this?
- Our mentor base has grown both in geography and numbers. We’ve grown from the 200 mentors in 2007 to 1200+ mentors today that stretch from US, Europe, and Africa to Asia.
- On average, 60 mentors attend every event with London known to bring together 250 mentors in 1 week each September.
- The largest categories of mentors are Entrepreneurs (300+), VC (300+) and Angels (120+), and Subject Matter Experts (Product, Technical, Marketing, Biz Dev). We also have Corporates, Recruiters, Lawyers, PR and Finance Experts. It’s an incredible group of experts all with experience building hyper growth tech businesses.
We are very proud of the hard work our companies have put in into building their businesses and are impressed by their drive and ambitions. Some have stayed in their countries, many have moved to London, and 3 have moved to the US, helping their Seedcamp family build more bridges across the Atlantic. We think we’re doing really well in Europe getting seed stage businesses, off the ground and helping them on the fast growth trajectory. Especially as the number of companies we back is still small, growing from the small number of 6 in 2007 to 13 in 2010 and between 15-20 expected in 2011.
We are excited that Seedcamp continues to attract an increasingly awesome set of founders. We are excited to share our results and help explain what we’ve been up to the last 4 years. We only hope more of the best entrepreneurs globally find Seedcamp a brilliant platform through which to grow their world-beating businesses.
We thank the 25+ Seedcamp investors who have backed Seedcamp and further invest into Seedcamp companies. We thank the Seedcamp sponsors that enable us to hold 11 annual events because without them going to every city wouldn’t be possible. We thank the Founder Sponsors that give the companies the extra edge. We thank the 1200+ mentors that come over and over again to meet the companies at an event and in many cases build their own relationships with these companies for the long-term. We thank the tireless and incredibly small team at Seedcamp for the 24-7-365 labor of love that is the start-up called Seedcamp.
Mostly, we thank the entire ecosystem for making Europe an incredible place to start-up.