Europe’s most prominent VCs ranked in new list for 2021

Dealroom has released its annual ranking of its most prominent venture capital investors for 2021. It follows another record-breaking year in 2020, where VC investment surpassed more than €38B in Europe.

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Working closely with the VC community and building on the success of previous years’ rankings, Dealroom has created a tool to help startup entrepreneurs and founders work out what investors they should spend time and energy on. The rankings are based on data captured by Dealroom’s database and direct feedback from VCs themselves.

Previous rankings have focused on the most prominent Seed and Series A round investors in Europe, but the 2021 edition expands this region to cover the whole of EMEA.

Dealroom has also introduced global rankings for the first time, in part because of the huge appetite from US investors for European tech startups and scaleups. Investments are counted by the territory in which they are made, rather than the location of the investor.

Yoram Wijngaarde, founder and CEO, Dealroom, said: “Two strong themes emerged from VC investing in 2020. The first is that Europe is now firmly on the global investor map. Some of the biggest US funds have voted with their feet, 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 $35B valuation earlier this year.

“The second is that European investors are not letting their foot off the gas.

“European VCs are raising bigger funds, signing bigger cheques, and more of them.

“For the first time, we have been able to rank the most prominent VCs – European and global – across a range of metrics, providing an even more transparent and valuable benchmarking tool for founders, LPs and investors alike.

“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. So this year we felt it made sense to add a global ranking into the mix.”

The lists

Top 10 EMEA Combined

Accel
Index Ventures
LocalGlobe
Entrée Capital
Point Nine Capital
Bessemer Venture Partners
Idinvest Partners
Seedcamp
Mangrove Capital Partners
Balderton Capital

In total, the top 10 most prominent investors made 254 EMEA deals during 2020. The top ten share a combined 133 unicorns in their portfolios, and 184 Future Unicorns.

The only entries from the EMEA top 10 to make the global ranking equivalent were Accel and Index Ventures, 3rd and 7th respectively, behind Sequoia Capital (2) and SV Angel (1). The entire top 10 made a total of 802 investments in the last 12 months.

When the EMEA data is broken down specifically into Seed and Series A deals, UK and French investors have so far had the highest unicorn and future unicorn hit rate.

Top 10 Seed EMEA

LocalGlobe
Entrée Capital
Point Nine Capital
Seedcamp
Mangrove Capital Partners
Cherry Ventures
SV Angel
BOLDstart Ventures
500 Startups
Hoxton Ventures

Within the top 10 most prominent Seed investors in EMEA in 2020 are four UK-based investors. Only three US-based VCs make it into the most prominent 10 Seed investors for EMEA investments, and they are SV Angel (7), BOLDstart Ventures (8) and 500 Startups (9).

Top 10 Series A EMEA

Accel
Index Ventures
Bessemer Venture Partners
Idinvest Partners
Balderton Capital
Sequoia Capital
Northzone
Atomico
HV Capital
Creandum

In the Series A category for EMEA, Accel came out on top with 31 EMEA portfolio and exited unicorns, 34 future unicorns and 32 EMEA deals. Second place Index Ventures meanwhile had 30 EMEA unicorns, 34 future unicorns and 35 deals. The investor with the highest number of future unicorns in their portfolio is fourth-place IDinvest Partners, with 41.

Top 5 UK Seed EMEA