Change Ventures September 2021 Update
🚀 We are humbled to have been selected by founders among the top 10 venture funds in Europe to work with. VC review site Landscape tallied up for Sifted the results based on founder feedback regarding speed, responsiveness and what additional value the funds provide for the startups. Thank you founders for ranking us so highly!
Aveli Nurk has joined our Tallinn team in the middle of June as the Finance Manager. Previously, she held managerial and advisory roles at transaction advisory in EY and KPMG, specializing in Financial Due Diligence and Valuations. Aveli holds a Master’s degree in Finance from Tallinn University of Technology. We’re certain our LPs will get to notice and enjoy the improvements on the reporting end.
Change Ventures new investments:
Outvio (🇪🇪/🇪🇸)- ecommerce fulfillment platform for SMEs. Change Ventures led the $3M Seed round to expand. Also participating were TMT Investments (London), Fresco Capital (San Francisco) and Lemonade Stand (Tallinn).
Eurora (🇪🇪) — global multicarrier ecommerce shipping platform. Change Ventures led the $3M Seed round to expand the sales and technical support team, and to scale sales with Asian ecommerce platforms shipping to EU customers. Also participating in the round: James Berdigans (Printify) and Artis Kehris (Printify) and Kristjan Vilosius (Katana MRP).
Memby (🇱🇹) — one-to-many interactive after-school tutoring platform. Change Ventures led the €800k Pre-Seed round. Our co-investors included the leading EdTech fund in Europe, Brighteye Ventures and the MJJ Foundation, plus notable angel investors Justas Janauskas (Vinted & Qoorio) and Martynas Gudonavičius (Trafi).
Change Ventures portfolio news:
Timbeter — CEO of Anna-Greta Tsahkna visited Kenya as part of Estonian President Kaljulaid’s delegation. Kenyan government agreed to begin a 1 year trial with Timbeter as the standard way to digitally measure, document and trace timber resources. Timbeter has initiated similar sustainable forest management programs already in Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Georgia and Norway.
Aerones released new product lines including a robot crawler that inspects the inside of wind turbine blades and a tower cleaning robot.
Nordigen’s free open banking API platform is rapidly gaining traction, take a look at the ground-breaking free account information service.
Change Ventures Resources & Baltic Funding Report updates:
The latest Baltic Startup Funding Report (H1 2021) is now available on our website. We have again gathered, compiled and analyzed all of the Baltic rounds — to share timely, reliable and relevant data with all the Baltic founders.
Main highlights and conclusions:
💡 A record €649M in capital was raised in H1 2021. First half funding numbers grew 3x compared to H1 2020. Large Series A and growth rounds are now a regular occurrence in the region.
💡 Pre-seed rounds are recovering from the pandemic slow-down. The number of pre-seed rounds is catching up with the level of H1 2020. Growth rounds show strong growth, with the number of deals more than doubling, which signals new growth money coming into the Baltic market.
💡 Seed rounds are clearly becoming more competitive. Compared to the prior periods, startups raised less capital, at slightly higher valuations, but with a lot less traction at the time of investment.
💡 Pre-Seed and Seed round recurring revenue numbers have declined significantly. The variance in revenues at time of closing the round continue to rise, with the lower quartile dropping to zero in both pre-seed and seed rounds.
💡 A record number of companies remained headquartered in the region after the Series A.
Recent Baltic startup funding announcements:
Growth rounds:
Bolt (🇪🇪) — mobility company developing Europe’s first SuperApp with ride hailing, car sharing, electric scooters, logistics and food delivery doubled its valuation to €4.75 billion with €600 million Series D funding round.
Beetroot Lab (🇱🇻) — mobile game development platform that has released over 100 games including their biggest hit “Dystopia: Contest of Heroes” raised a €10 million investment round from Exantech (MAL), part of a London-based investment group Exante. EUR 100m credit line from Exante to fund user acquisition for “Dystopia: Contest of Heroes” marketing.
Sonarworks (🇱🇻) — developer of precision audio software used by Grammy-Award-winning producers announced a €6 million funding round led by Almaz Capital with participation from Karma Ventures, Trind Ventures, Proks Capital, Smart Growth VC, LLC., Wiser Financial Advisors OÜ, and angel investors Cesar Lamschtein and Victor Yun.
Series A:
EstateGuru (🇪🇪) — property lending platform raised a €6M series A led by TMT Investments and Verve Ventures to fuel its expansion into Spain, the Netherlands and the UK.
Fractory (🇪🇪) — on-demand metal manufacturing platform raised a €7.5M Series A led by OTB Ventures to expand its service portfolio.
Seed:
Single Earth (🇪🇪) — tokenized carbon credit market raised $6.6M Led by EQT Ventures to link carbon and biodiversity credits to the sale of raw materials such as forests, which cause CO2.
Aurelia (🇪🇪) — financial automation platform for SMEs raised €2.5M led by Blossom Capital to expand to Romania, Germany and the U.K.
Montonio (🇪🇪) — buy now pay later financing solution raised €2.5M led by Tera Ventures to expand into new markets across the EU.
Pre-seed:
Watalook (🇱🇹) — digital assistant for beauticians raised €850K in funding from Startup Wise Guys, Crosspring, and Launchpad Capital for expanding services in new markets.
FleetGuru (🇪🇪) — fleet efficiency management platform raised €530K from Superangel and LemonadeStand for expanding from Baltics and bringing fleet management in Europe to the digital age.
SpaceIT (🇪🇪) cloud-based mission control platform for low-cost satellite operations raised €1M from Icebreaker.vc and UG Investments to fuel development and expand the sales team.
Job Postings:
Change Ventures portfolio companies are growing fast and need talent — check out the job opportunities in the links below.
Outvio: 8 Job Openings, find out more here. 💼
Interactio: 33 Job Openings, find out more here.💼
Eurora: 8 Job Openings, find out more here.💼
Memby:Community/Operations Manager, Mid/Senior Full Stack Developer, Creative Director (full-time).💼
Veriff: 18 Job Openings, find out more here.💼
Nordigen: Data Analyst, Product Owner, Public Relations Project Manager. 💼
Giraffe360: 4 Job Openings, find out more here.💼
INZMO: Researcher, Vice President of Sales, Senior Developer.💼
99math: UX/UI Designer, Software Engineer (JS pro), Worldwide Community Builder, Product Owner. 💼
As always, we recommend trying out MeetFrank for your talent recruitment needs.
Content we loved:
Index Ventures has created a simple online tool for helping you set up your employee stock option plan based on data from 20,000 option grants from more than 1,650 startups across the US and Europe.
In another sign of our changing world, a US judge ruled that only ‘natural persons’ can be recognised as patent inventors, so that AIs cannot patent their own inventions.
Joanne “Gotham Gal” Wilson explains why she is getting out of the angel investment game as she is faced with pre-seed startups with a $30M valuation straight out YCombinator and a market that “values a company that sells mattresses like a software company.”
Indonesia with 6.5 million crypto investors now has more crypto traders than stock market investors.
Thanks for reading, we will be back soon!
Gabriele, Yrjö, Rait, Andris and Aveli.
