European Tech Weekly (Series A & beyond) - Week 12
19 selected European funding rounds announced last week
Welcome to the latest edition of European Tech Weekly, a newsletter that provides a summary of Series A+ funding rounds in Europe on a weekly basis.
About the author - my name is Chirag Modi and I am a tech investor based in London, UK. I am fascinated by technology investing in private as well as public markets and strive to learn from founders, operators, and fellow investors. You can reach me elsewhere on Linkedin and Twitter.
Funding Announcements in Europe by Stage
Note: Minimum deal size of $10m; excludes several sectors such as biotech; non-exhaustive
Company Profiles - Series A
Lucca (France | $71m Series A | Software | One Peak Partners)
Founded in 2002 and headquartered in France, Lucca develops SaaS solutions to optimize administrative and HR processes. It raised $71m in Series A funding led by One Peak Partners. It is the first institutional funding round after being bootstrapped for 20 years.
According to tech.eu, “the startup’s solutions address the main administrative and HR management issues: time and activity management, expense reports, personnel administration, annual reviews, as well as measuring well-being at work.” With a focus on the mid-market, the company has more than 5,300 clients and 1,100,000 users.
“Proceeds will be used to accelerate product innovation, with a focus on spend management, training and workforce planning. The platform also wants to hire more than 400 employees over the next 3 years. The company plans to reach revenues in excess of €100 million by 2025.”
Sources: Tech.eu
Leapsome (Germany | $60m Series A | Software | Insight Partners)
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Germany, Leapsome is a platform for Performance Management & Employee Engagement. It raised $60m in Series A funding led by Insight Partners. Creandum and Visionaries Club also participated. It is the first institutional funding round after being bootstrapped since inception.
According to tech.eu, “designed with flexibility in mind, Leapsome’s modular service helps companies drive employee engagement, performance, and development, by providing HR teams the ability to automate a number of feedback and training processes. Leapsome was designed from the ground up to operate in tandem with any number of corporate tools, today including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Workday, and BambooHR, and is in use by over 1,000 customers worldwide.
Leapsome reports being a profitable company, with revenues tripling in 2021. The investment will help the startup further accelerate its U.S. market presence while at the same time introducing new products and features.
Sources: Tech.eu, Press release
Weglot (France | $50m Series A | Software | Partech)
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in France, Weglot is a no-code SaaS solution for website translation. It raised $50m in Series A funding led by Partech.
According to eu-startups, “the company offers no-code website translation software that allows anyone to launch a multilingual website instantly. It both translates and displays the content of a website, removing the pain of having to manage multiple websites for multiple markets.”
Weglot has already helped more than 60k B2B and B2C brands translate and display their websites into multiple languages, including Microsoft, Spotify, Steve Madden, and Volcom. According to Techcrunch, “Weglot generated $11m in ARR in 2021.”
Sources: Techcrunch, EU-Startups
Neobrain (France | $22m Series A | Software | Various)
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in France, Neobrain is an HR skills management platform. It raised $22m in Series A funding led by Alter Equity, Crédit Mutuel Innovation, and XAnge (operating on behalf of La Poste Ventures).
The platform enables companies to anticipate changes in job roles and enhance the skills and motivation of employees. The company provides 4 modules:
(1) Neobrain Skills: anticipate the evolution of skills and map the available resources
(2) Neobrain Talents: retain talent with a great user experience
(3) Neobrain Mobility: support cross-functional internal mobility
(4) Neobrain Upskilling: help implement effective development plans
In just four years, already more than 80 major accounts and 300k employees have adopted Neobrain. According to tech.eu, “since 2019 Neobrain has seen a tripling of turnover, and has grown the team from 15 to a now 80 individuals.” The funding is expected to fuel aggressive international expansion plans as well as further refine the company’s technology.
Sources: Tech.eu
Breedr (UK | $16m Series A | Software | Investbridge Capital)
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in the UK, Breedr is a livestock data platform. It raised $16m in Series A funding led by Investbridge Capital.
According to UKTN, “Breedr is a data analysis tool for farmers to record animal information using their phone. The data collected can then be used to improve efficiencies and sustainability. Farmers can also sell animals through the live trading platform and use them as a cash-flow product.”
"Since its inception, the company had 4,000 signups with over 160,000 registered animals. Since January 2021, the Breedr Marketplace has sold over 6,000 animals with a combined value of over £4.5m. Breedr will use the funding to develop its financial products and for international expansion into the Australian and US markets.”
One of its new products is a data financial tool called ‘Breedr Impact’, which lets farmers release equity from their livestock to expand their business.
Source: UKTN
Bigblue (France | $15m Series A | Other | Runa Capital)
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in France, Bigblue is a fulfillment solution for DTC brands. It raised $15m in Series A funding led by Runa Capital.
According to Techcrunch, “the startup currently operates in three countries — France, Spain and the U.K. It has signed partnerships with five different warehouses representing over 60,000 square meters of storage space. Bigblue customers can ship their products directly to these warehouses so that they are stored and managed by Bigblue. After that, every time a customer orders something from a Bigblue client, the product is shipped to the end customer using Bigblue’s carrier network. The startup has integrations with more than 20 different carriers and can ship all across Europe — and even globally, but finding different D2C fulfillment partners in other markets might be a smarter move.”
“With this new round we will support scaling service offerings for Bigblue’s growing base of online merchants, fuel hiring efforts, and continue to position the company as the leader in the D2C fulfillment space,” co-founder and CEO Tim Dumain said in a statement.
Sources: Techcrunch
Decentriq (Switzerland | $15m Series A | Software | Eclipse Ventures)
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Switzerland, Decentriq is an enterprise SaaS solution providing data clean rooms. It raised $15m in Series A funding led by Eclipse Ventures
According to Venturebeat, “data clean rooms refers to a secure environment where customer data is anonymized, processed, normalized, and stored. The concept is designed to balance privacy with utility, helping to aggregate data from different sources and combine it with first-party data to provide insights.”
According to EU-startups, “Decentriq’s cloud-based platform enables enterprises to access sensitive data – which falls under GDPR or is strategically important – in a confidential and protected environment. Organizations can also apply external machine learning models to their internal datasets. This enables organizations to manage, analyze and share their data within minutes, without needing to trust a third party, and in compliance with privacy requirements as the data is also encrypted while being in use.”
Sources: Venturebeat, EU-startups
Unleash (Norway | $14m Series A | Software | Spark Capital)
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Norway, Unleash is an enterprise-ready open source feature management platform. It raised $14m in Series A funding led by Spark Capital.
The technology allows enterprises the ability to release, test, and validate new features more effectively and to targeted groups of users. By open-sourcing feature flags, full-stack and infrastructure developers can more easily identify any possible negative impact and collect user reactions to the change before rolling it out enterprise-wide
Docker pulls of Unleash open source grew by 548% to over 12 million, helping to drive 8x year-over-year revenue growth from January 2021 to January 2022. The new capital will be used to expand in the United States and Europe and scale product development and go-to-market organization including marketing, sales, and customer success.
Sources: Press release
YZR (France | $12m Series A | Software | Nauta Capital, Orange Ventures)
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in France, YZR is a no-code, plug-and-play, data preparation platform. IT raised $12m in Series A funding co-led by Nauta Capital and Orange Ventures.
YZR’s data preparation platform makes it easier, better, and faster to normalize and prepare data for downstream ingestion. Their AI-powered standardization, labeling, and context-understanding software have in-depth sector-specific semantic knowledge to quickly enable business units to draw value from it.
Source: Privateequitywire
Agentifai (UK | $11m Series A | Software | BlueCrow Capital)
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Portugal, Agentifai develops advanced AI assistants. It raised $11m in Series A funding led by BlueCrow Capital.
Making use of Deep Neural Networks and NLP, Agentifai crafted Alice – the AI assistant that understands natural language and efficiently communicates and engages with customers. The solution is currently focused on financial services and healthcare verticals.
Sources: TheGoaspotlight
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