Funding for European tech appears to have stabilized in 2024 after dropping precipitously in 2023, but the signs continue to point to more tough times ahead, according to the latest State of European Tech report.
The annual survey, produced by European VC firm Atomico, notes that startups in the region are on track to raise $45 billion this year. While far from the 50% drop of 2023, the figure is still down by $2 billion compared to a year ago. Atomico originally projected $45 billion for 2023; it has since revised 2023 up to $47 billion.
The decline this year is slight but is notable because the narrative post-pandemic had been that the drop we saw in 2023 was simply a return to “normal” growth curves.
That narrative goes something like this: funding and other tech market indicators have been steadily rising for almost as long as they have been tracked. The years 2021 and 2022 were outliers, resulting from a burst of activity from more people using cloud, mobile and other digital services at home and at work during the pandemic, and thousands of companies and investors rushing to meet the opportunity. But by the end of 2022, it was clear that the “new normal” was not here to stay. So, things settled back to “old normal” and we are back on track.
Well, 2024 figures now show us we may need to rethink all that, again.
Atomico has been producing these reports annually for the last decade, so this latest edition makes a lot of noise about how much things have improved.
It’s undeniable that the tech ecosystem in Europe has blown up: Atomico says there are now 35,000 tech companies in the region that could be classified as “early stage,” with 3,400 late-stage companies and 358 valued at over $1 billion. Compare that to 2015, when there were a mere 7,800 early-stage startups, 450 late-stage startups and just 72 tech companies valued at over $1 billion.
Yet there is a lot of sobering reading, too, about some of the challenges of the moment and signs of how geopolitical and economic unrest — despite shiny stories about the boom in AI — continue to weigh down the market.
Here are some of the breakout stats:
Exits have fallen off a cliff
This is one of the more stark tables in the report, underscoring some of the liquidity pressure that ultimately trickles down to earlier-stage tech companies.
Put simply, M&As and IPOs are relatively non-existent right now in European tech. This year, at the time of the report being published in mid-November, saw just $3 billion in IPO value and $10 billion in M&A, according to S&P Capital figures. Both of these are big drops on the overall trend, which had otherwise seen steady rises in both, “consistently surpassing the $50 billion per year threshold.”
Granted, sometimes all it takes is one big deal to make a year. In 2023, for example, ARM’s $65 billion IPO accounted for a full 92% of total IPO value, and clearly it didn’t have the knock-on effect many had hoped for in kick-starting more activity.
Transaction volumes, Atomico notes, are at their lowest points in a decade.
Image Credits:Atomico Debt is on the rise
As you might expect, debt financing is filling in the funding gap, especially for startups raising growth rounds. So far this year, debt financing made up a full 14% of all VC investments, totaling some $4.7 billion.
That’s a big jump on last year, according to Dealroom’s figures: In 2023, debt made up just $2.6 billion of financing, accounting for 5.5% of all VC investments. Debt at its best is raised when companies are in strong financial positions and do not want to give up more equity to raise money to grow. The other side of the coin is when debt, often more easily raised than equity, is picked up because equity rounds are harder to come by.
So the big question on debt remains as ever: will all the companies racking it up definitely make good on paying it down?
Image Credits:Atomico Average round sizes have improved
Last year, the average size of every stage of funding, from Series A to D, declined in Europe, with only seed-stage rounds continuing to increase.
However, amid the overall decline in the number of funding rounds in the region, the startups that are managing to close deals are, on average, raising more. The average Series A round is now $10.6 million (2023: $9.3 million), Series B is at $25.4 million (2023: $21.3 million), and Series C is at $55 million (2023: $43 million).
The U.S. continues to outpace Europe on round sizes overall.
But don’t expect rounds to be raised in quick successions
Atomico noted that the number of startups, on average, raising within a 24-month time frame declined by 20%. It has also taken longer for companies to go from Series A to Series B in what the firm calls “compressed” time frames of 15 months or less — just 16% raised a Series B in that period in 2024.
As you can see in the table below, the number of rounds this year is lower than what we saw the year before.
Image Credits:Atomico AI continues to lead the pack
As with 2023, artificial intelligence continued to dominate conversations. Atomico spells this out with a graph showing the burst of AI mentions in earnings calls.
Image Credits:Atomico That has been a strong theme among private companies. Between companies like Wayve, Helsing, Mistral, Poolside, DeepL, and many others, AI startups have led the pack when it comes to the biggest venture deals this year in Europe, raising $11 billion in all.
Even so, Atomico points out, “Europe has a long way to close the gap with the U.S. in terms of AI funding.” Thanks to outsized rounds for companies like OpenAI, all told, the U.S. is shaping up to have invested $47 billion in AI companies this year — that’s right, $2 billion more than all startup investment in Europe.
The U.K. (thanks in big part to Wayve’s outsized raise of the year in Europe, but also because it simply has more companies raising more rounds across more stages) is currently the biggest market for AI funding in the region, Atomico said.
Valuations are improving…
After startup valuations “bottomed out” in 2023, Atomico sees them rising again, lagging behind the slow return of activity in the public markets. Some of that is likely also due to the outsized rounds raised by certain companies in certain fields like AI.
More generally, it appears that founders are more open to dilution on larger rounds in earlier stages, which plays out as higher valuations. Startups raising at later stages are picking up the pieces of that earlier exuberance and are raising down-rounds, Atomico said.
European startups continue to see lower valuations than their American counterparts, on average between 29% and 52% lower, Atomico notes.
In the graph below, charting Series C, the average valuation of U.S. startups is $218 million, compared to $155 million for startups in Europe.
…but sentiment is not
If confidence is a strong indicator of a market’s health, there might be some work ahead for the motivators out there.
Atomico has been polling founders and investors annually, asking how they feel about the state of the market compared to a year ago, and 2024 appears to be a high-water mark for low confidence.
In a frank assessment of how founders and investors are viewing the market at the moment, a record proportion — respectively 40% and 26% — said they felt less confident than 12 months ago.
Image Credits:Atomico