⭐️Data Driven VC surveyed 276 foundations, which startup databases they use

📟Crunchbase is the leader with the cheapest subscription price on the market. The most expensive Pitchbook is in second place. In third place is Dealroom, which has the highest percentage of coverage in terms of companies.

💫At the same time, most of the information about founders and investors is on Pitchbook. He is also the leader in covering deals.

📟But the results of the study show that Dealroom has made the most powerful leap since 2019. And now it has almost caught up with the long—standing market leaders - Pitchbook and Crunchbase.

💡In general, the database market for VC and startups has been developing strongly lately. I wrote recently that over the past few months I have talked to at least three projects that are building solutions to help investors.

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🙂OpenseedVC, which backs operators in Africa and Europe starting their companies, reaches first close of $10M fund

Founder-market fit is one of the most crucial factors in a startup’s success, and operators (someone involved in the day-to-day operations of a startup) turned founders have an almost unfair advantage in finding that fit. #️⃣

💫The same principle applies somewhat to operator VCs (firms typically launched by former startup founders). While there’s no definitive proof that operator VCs make better investors, recent research does indicate that founders and operators who become VCs are significantly more successful at backing companies than traditional investor VCs.

#️⃣Data shows that a lack of expertise and business acumen in founders contributes to failed VC investments.

💫Operator VCs have a long history in Silicon Valley. Still, their adoption is less widespread in Europe and Africa: only 8% of VC firms in Europe and Africa are led by former operators, compared to nearly half in the US. OpenseedVC is applying the model in Africa and Europe with a new fund.

💡 firm, which plans to be the first check in startups launched by operators across both regions, has reached the first close of its $10 million angel-style early-stage fund.

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💡Dealroom issued a study on the startup and VC market in Central and Eastern Europe for 2023 and Q1-2024
#VentureNews

💫Highlights:💫

📟The total valuation of all startups in the region has increased 2.4 times over the past 5 years from $89 billion in 2019 to $213 billion in 2023.

📟+-1000 startups in 110+ cities in the region raised €2.1 billion in 2023. There are 26 thousand startups in the region, but only 7 thousand raised venture capital money.

📟AB Q1-2024, 45% of all venture capital money in the region went to AI and 26% to Climate Tech. These are the hottest industries in the region

📟40% of all venture capital money is concentrated in the Baltic States, Estonia leads by a large margin (€420.3M)

📟The number of exits has increased 4 times over the past 10 years, but most of them are acquisitions.

📟Since the beginning of 2023, investors in the region have raised $ 1.9 billion from LPs. Most new funds in Tallinn (5 pieces)

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⚡️SeekOut, a recruiting startup last valued at $1.2 billion, lays off 30% of its workforce

⚫️SeekOut, an eight-year-old recruiting startup that uses AI to find candidates, cut about 30% of its workforce this past Thursday, TechCrunch has learned.

⭐️“Lately, we have been spending roughly $2 to earn $1, and this last fiscal year, we incurred significant cash burn,” SeekOut’s CEO Anoop Gupta and CTO Aravind Bala wrote in a letter to employees. “Unfortunately, to put us on a sustainable trajectory, we must make significant employee reductions.”

🔣This is the second time the Seattle-based startup has had layoffs. SeekOut laid off 16 employees in October, or about 7% of its workforce at that time, GeekWire reported. After its October staff cuts, the company had around 200 employees, according to the report.

⭐️SeekOut was last valued at over $1.2 billion in January 2022, when it raised a $115 million in a Series C round led by Tiger Global. At that time, the company’s revenue was growing 300% a year and its annual recurring revenue (ARR) ranged between $25 million and $50 million.

#VentureNews

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🏃‍♂️ETF Partners raises €285M for climate startups that will be effective quickly — not 20 years down the road

⚡️While many climate investors focus their efforts on breakthrough, deep-tech solutions, Patrick Sheehan at ETF Partners has other ideas.

#️⃣I’ve actually got nothing against carbon capture and storage, apart from the fact it’s probably going to be commercialized too late, he told TechCrunch. Instead, Sheehan and his colleagues are diving into more software-centric companies that promise to still move the needle.

💫“There are those who say that’s a cop out,” Sheehan said. “The more I look at it, the more I completely disagree with that notion. We need to find companies we can scale rapidly to have an impact within the lifetime of a venture capital fund. That’s 10 years maximum.”

⚡️It’s a sentiment that has helped ETF Partners raise a new, oversubscribed €285 million fund, the firm’s fourth.

💫The firm was founded in 2006, and it has ridden a series of bull and bear markets. Until 2018, Sheehan describes his work as having been “more evangelical.” Since then, he has found limited partners to be much more receptive to climate tech. “It’s become much more of a good institutional product.”

#VentureNews

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🚀Alchemist’s latest batch puts AI to work as accelerator expands to Tokyo, Doha
#VentureNews

🔎Alchemist Accelerator has a new pile of AI-forward companies demoing their wares today, if you care to watch, and the program itself is making some international moves into Tokyo and Doha. Read on for our picks of the batch.

💫Chatting with Alchemist CEO and founder Ravi Belani ahead of demo day about this cohort, it was clear that ambitions for AI startups have contracted, and that’s not a bad thing.

🌐“The cost of building a basic LLM is prohibitively high; you get into the hundreds of millions of dollars just to get it out. The question is, as a startup, how do you compete?” Belani said. “VCs don’t want wrappers around LLMs. We’re looking for companies where there’s a vertical play, where they own the end user and there’s a network effect and lock-in over time.”

🔎No early-stage startup today is at all likely to become the next OpenAI or Anthropic — their lead is too huge right now in the domain of foundational large language models.

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⭐️Harlem Capital is raising a $150 million fund

Harlem Capital is raising a $150 million fund, according to documents filed with the SEC.

🏃‍♂️ If raised, this new fund, the firm’s third, would be its largest to date. In 2021, Harlem Capital raised an oversubscribed $134 million, much more than the $40 million it raised for its inaugural fund in 2019.

The firm was founded in 2015 with the goal of backing diverse founders. Its second fund focused on early-stage post-product companies from all sectors but with a particular focus on consumer and enterprise tech. The firm currently has $174 million in assets under management, according to Pitchbook, and has made more than 80 investments since its inception, with 12 exits. Investments include Propense.ai, the fintech Poolit, and the e-commerce platform Gander.

🏃‍♂️ Harlem Capital also focused on raising from diverse limited partners for its second fund, and it’s safe to assume that mission will continue as the firm stays true to its mission of supporting the next generation of diverse founders.

💡The successful raising of this $150 million fund will be not only a show of success for Harlem Capital and its founders but also a testament to the industry’s appetite for still believing in and backing talented, underrepresented communities.

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