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August 09, 2007
London Is Startup City But Berlin Is Climbing
Europe doesn't have a center for VCs and founders like Silicon Valley, but it does have some hotspots. Problem is they are not always in the same place, as the latest stats from Dutch venture database publisher Tornado Insider reveal.
In its weekly newsletter Tornado reports today that Germany moved up to second place for attracting venture capital investment in 2007, edging out France which has been number two to the UK's number one of late.
City-wise, London is still the hottest with 8.2% of all deals and Paris is number two, but the surprise is that the German capital, Berlin, climbed up the ranking to the third spot from 8th with 3.5% of all deals in 2007 and fourth place was snagged by another German city, Munich, with 3.1%.
Hamburg-based venture fund Neuhaus Capital is doing some deal sourcing in the region, we hear, so we asked Neuhaus' Paul Jozefak (babblingVC) why the city is attracting founders and their backers. "It's the cheapest place to set up shop and easy to get people to move there. It's cheap living, lots of "action" meaning the under 40 crowd is easy to relocate there, and internationally it even has status, " responded Jozefak. (Image source: germany-tourism.de)
We have reported good-sized rounds raised by Berlin-area ventures in recent months, such as Snom Technologies (VOIP hardware), Nanotron (Wireless Sensor Networks), along with several smaller rounds for growing Web startups like myphotobook.de, qiro, and dawanda. The M&A activity in and around Berlin is probably encouraging investors' choices (See a roundup here)
Tornado Insider also listed cities that are losing out in 2007, such as Cambridge (2.1% in 2007; 3.1% since 2000), Dublin (1.4% in 2007; 3.1% since 2000) and Stockholm (0.9% in 2007; 2.9% since 2000).
While the UK and London have secured the most deals with 30.6% of all technology investments this year, said the Dutch venture data publisher, Germany topped France raising 16.7% to France's 11%. Israel held steady in fourth place with 8.7%, followed by The Netherlands with 6.3% in 2007.
Posted on August 9, 2007 06:58 PM | Posted to Being European | Permalink
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