European tech companies raise €3.4 billion in Q3 2016

During the third quarter of 2016, European companies raised about €3.2 billion in venture capital, preliminary data from Dealroom shows. After several quarters of €4 billion+ funding this is quite a significant drop. This seems in line with recent market sentiment. However, we must be wary of confirmation bias. One or two big rounds could have swung the numbers in a completely different way.

The most significant decline is in seed rounds. Caveat: many Q3 seed rounds may still be announced or added to Dealroom by users in the coming weeks.

Below is the chart also by country, showing that France and Sweden really had a break-out year so far in 2016.

European VC shifting to continental Europe

The below chart does a good job of visualising how European VC is becoming less dependent on UK and Germany, which have dominated historically, and becoming more distributed across the continent. Especially France and Sweden are driving this so far in 2016.

German funding dropped significantly in 2016 thus far compared to 2015, mainly resulting from a drop in funding activity from Rocket Internet and affiliated companies. Within the Rocket circle, it was Jumia‘s turn to raise capital (= Africa Internet Group). Jumia, based in Paris, raised €425M this year.

In the UK, companies raised over €700 million in Q3, roughly the same as the previous quarter. Talks about an imminent Brexit-induced market crash have subdued and short-term UK macro is looking robust. Over the medium and long run, the impact remains to be seen of course.

Digging deeper into the numbers

Dealroom offers three ways to analyse Q3 in more detail:

1. a detailed table of all Q3 ranked rounds by size;

2. the Funding Heatmap to explore activity by city, by business model, and by industry (including links to each underlying deal!).

Final notes:

  • If we include Masmovil’s acquisition financing, the total is €3.9 billion (which is the number you see in these charts)
  • Dealroom includes Israel, Turkey and Russia in our European aggregate figures
  • Funding includes all announced new capital invested in companies. We exclude exits, buyouts, secondary transactions
  • CORRECTION: when this article was published on 1 October, the prelminary amount of total funding was €3.2B. This has now been corrected to €3.4B