The 2020 edition of Europe’s Most Prominent Venture Capital Investors is live
We’re excited to unveil the 2020 and third edition of Europe’s Most Prominent Venture Capital Investors. It’s our annual composite ranking of thousands of VC investors, based on quantitative and transparent criteria only. In December we previewed the ranking, and we’ve received thousands of data submissions since then, allowing us to solidify the underlying data. Today it’s time to present the final ranking.
Before we get to that, a quick recap about the ranking itself. Its main purpose is making it easier to find relevant investors in everyday situations, such as looking for (co-)investors for a round, landing a VC job, or building a network. It’s not a performance ranking per se; nor is it meant to be, although there’s a high correlation between performance and the ranking, which is why many LPs use the ranking as a guideline too, as actual performance data is somewhat limited.
Compared with last year’s methodology, we made three significant changes:
Firstly, we’ve split the ranking into Seed and Series A investors. We’re leaving late stage VCs out of this ranking for now, but we will create a combined ranking later this year.
Secondly, we put more weight on unicorn investments this year. We’re counting unicorns that have been realised via an exit above $1 billion. We’re also counting unrealised unicorns that are still in the portfolio, but have an implied value of $1 billion+ based on one or more transactions that followed the investor’s own initial round. Both realised and unrealised unicorns are weighed equally (unrealised is yet unproven, but usually more recent than realised). As in previous years, only European unicorn investments are counted.
Thirdly, investors without any unicorns are ranked based on the number of future unicorns in portfolio (companies valued $250M-$1B) and by number of investments in the last 12 months. The number of investments made is not a performance measurement, of course. But in many everyday situations it’s useful to know which investors are most active.
All this still leaves young funds underrepresented. For instance, Blossom Capital is a relatively new fund with an impressive track record that’s probably under-indexed. We will introduce a mechanism to correct for this nex time.
Adding colour to the ranking, Sifted spoke to several of the top ranked VCs. After all: “there’s more to Europe’s startup ecosystem than its unicorn count”.
If you have any questions or feedback on the ranking please contact us on Twitter, Intercom or email.
The overall top-10 VC investors for 2020 are as follows:
Top 10 Seed Stage investors:
- GFC
- LocalGlobe
- Seedcamp
- Point Nine Capital
- Hoxton Ventures
- Agoranov
- Cherry Ventures
- Atlantic Labs
- Caixa Capital Risc
- Venrex
Top 10 Series A investors:
- Index Ventures
- Accel Partners
- HV Holtzbrinck Ventures
- Northzone
- Balderton Capital
- Idinvest Partners
- Lakestar
- Target Global
- Atomico
- Battery Ventures
Top-5 rankings per country:
Many venture capital firms self-identify as pan-European or global funds. Nevertheless, we’ve organised the funds below by their main location (where the majority of the team is based) to get a more complete picture across Europe beyond the top-10. On the investor profile you can see in which countries they primarily invest.
Top UK-based Seed stage investors:
Top UK-based Series A stage investors:
Top German-speaking Seed stage investors:
Top German-speaking Series A stage investors:
France’s top Seed stage investors:
France’s top Series A investors:
Sweden’s top 5 Seed stage investors:
Sweden’s top Series A stage investors:
The Netherlands’ top Seed stage investors:
The Netherlands’ top Series A stage investors: