London-based DN Capital, which has invested in Shazam and Videdressing among others, has today announced it’s raised $200 million (€144 million) for its third venture capital fund, GVC III, a three time increase on its previous fund. Investors include family offices, large institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds, including the European Investment Fund.
The fund will, as before, focus on early and growth stage companies in northern Europe, particularly the UK, Germany, and the Nordics with an allocation for US companies expanding into Europe.
Nenad Marovac, founder and managing partner, said the raise was “well ahead of our target and significantly oversubscribed.” He says there are “terrific start-ups in the European market at the moment.” This is DN’s largest fund to date.
DN Capital now has $320 million in total under management and has invested in around 50 companies since 2000. The Pan-European early-stage venture capital firm typically invests €1-10 million per company depending on investment stage.
In the wider marketplace, London’s Index Ventures raised a new fund this year of $550 million, while over the road, Balderton Capital raised $305 million earlier this year. Last year Accel Partners in London raised an early stage fund of $475 million.
According to data from Dow Jones VentureSource European startups have raised more than $2.8 billion (€2.1 billion) from VCs in the second quarter of 2014, the highest quarterly total since that iconic dot com bust year of 2001. The UK remains the biggest country, where companies have raised 28% of the total amount in the second quarter, followed by France with 19% and Germany with 15%. London-based Index Ventures was the busiest VC firm in Europe, with 16 deals completed, according to VentureSource.
What’s clear from all this however is that European VC funds are taking advantage of the resurgence of tech startups to raise new funds. There are also many more exits happening.
There were 92 European tech “exits” in the second quarter of 2014, of which 10 were IPOs. This is up from 54 deals tracked in Q1 2014, an increase of about 70 percent, according to Tech.eu.
Already this year, two London companies have been sold for some £1bn in total – Artificial Intelligence startup DeepMind was bought by Google while Zynga bought games company Natural Motion.
This year the IPO on the London Stock Market of property portal Zoopla attracted blue-chip investors to its £900m / $1.53m floatation, and the share price has gained since then.
According to CrunchBase, DN Capital’s Investments so far this year include:
PurpleBricks
Real Estate Agency
$13.4M / Series A with 3 other investors
Quandoo
An online reservation platform
$25M / Series C with 5 other investors
Book a Tiger
Online booking platform for professional cleaners.
undisclosed amount / Seed with 2 other investors
Hybrid Logic
$1.4M / Seed with 2 other investors
Ombud
Social IT Research Platform
undisclosed amount / Seed
Vint Training
P2P Marketplace for Fitness Instructors
$1.8M / Seed with 2 other investors
eWings.com
Professional flight bookings
undisclosed amount / Seed with 1 other investor
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