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Dealroom has released its annual ranking of the most prominent venture capital investors after a record-breaking year.
VC investment in Europe surpassed €38bn last year, according to Amsterdam-based Dealroom.
In the company’s latest annual ranking, it named Accel, Index Ventures and LocalGlobe as the most prominent investors in the EMEA region. Dealroom said that the leading 10 investors combined made 254 EMEA deals during 2020.
The ranking is based on data captured by Dealroom’s database as well as direct feedback from VCs. While previous rankings have focused on the most prominent seed and Series A investors in Europe, the 2021 report expands this to cover the whole of EMEA.
Top 10 EMEA VCs
- Accel
- Index Ventures
- LocalGlobe
- Entrée Capital
- Point Nine Capital
- Bessemer Venture Partners
- Idinvest Partners
- Seedcamp
- Mangrove Capital Partners
- Balderton Capital
Sonali De Rycker, partner at Accel, said it feels like the European ecosystem has really come of age.
“It’s 21 years this year since we opened our London office and we’ve seen first-hand how pockets of incredible talent, innovation and ambition across Europe have evolved into 20 or so interconnecting hubs that have all reached a tipping point,” she said.
“The quality of entrepreneurs, the strength of the ecosystem and companies being built by first and second-generation teams, as well as the availability of capital, have all come together to produce a stream of global success stories.”
This year’s Dealroom report also includes global rankings for the first time, due to the increased interest from US investors in European tech start-ups.
The only entries from the EMEA top 10 to make the global ranking were Accel and Index Ventures, with Accel coming in third behind SV Angel and Sequoia Capital.
Top 10 global VCs
- SV Angel
- Sequoia Capital
- Accel
- Kleiner Perkins
- Andreessen Horowitz
- Index Ventures
- GV
- 500 Startups
- BoxGroup
- First Round Capital
Dealroom’s founder and CEO, Yoram Wijngaarde, said the latest findings show that Europe is “firmly on the global investor map” with some of the biggest US firms such as Sequoia setting up European offices in 2020.
“Global VCs want to ensure they don’t miss the next UIPath – a company founded in Romania that reached a $35bn valuation earlier this year.”
Additionally, he said European VCs are raising bigger funds and signing bigger cheques.
“Venture capital and innovation is increasingly borderless. US investors have broadened their horizons, and European VCs are also investing all over the world, driven by global opportunities and enabled by distributed working in the last 12 months,” Wijngaarde said.
Dealroom’s findings on the growing strength of investment in Europe echo other similar reports. Earlier this year, PitchBook’s European Venture Report for 2020 showed that several start-ups raised more than €500m in funding, making 2020 a record-breaking year for investment value in Europe.
