European Venture is on the Rise Again

A quarter of the year down and European Venture is on the rise yet again. Check out my podcast interview with Intelligence Squared podcast on the booming European tech space and play the interactive crime thriller Dead Man’s Phone. We hope you enjoy this month’s newsletter.

Europe's Booming Tech Scene

With the exponential growth of companies like Spotify and Ayden, can Europe finally rival the U.S and China as the world's leading tech hub? I spoke with Intelligence Squared’s Linda Yueh about why Europe has the potential to dominate the next ten years of tech and the major trends we should all be looking out for, from FinTech to NFTs.

Become a London Homicide Detective with Dead Man’s Phone

Dead Man’s Phone is an interactive crime drama where you, the detective, investigate and solve murders through the smartphone of victims. This new game format and genre is reinventing gaming for the crime podcast age. The game requires you to find clues from the scene and the victim's phone. And you can command the police team as well as interrogate suspects.

The BAFTA-nominated game has been downloaded more than 300k times and iOS users gave it 4.8 stars.

Download the app yourself and see if you can identify the murderer!

Record After Record - European Startups Raise Record Funding in Q1 2021

Newly released data from Dealroom reflect that Q1 2021 was yet another blockbuster quarter for European startups, which raised €16.6bn - more than double Q1 2020 (€7.9bn). Megarounds at later-stage companies, such as Klarna (€1bn), UiPath ($750m), Wolt ($530m), Checkout.com ($450m), Epidemic Sound ($450m) and Hopin ($400m) contributed to that record quarter.

Crunchbase data show that investments for early-stage companies are up by 62 percent year over year and by 49 percent quarter over quarter.

Moonfire Zoom Series

Last month we welcomed VC and “growth marketer” Matt Lerner for an incredible session, which provided our founders with an opportunity to receive live, hands-on feedback on their customer acquisition messaging. The highly interactive session led to updated webpages and new approaches to connecting with potential clients.

Today we will host Daniel Bay, Head of People and Workplace at GOAT, to explore one of our most frequently discussed topics - talent and hiring. GOAT represents the leading platforms for authentic sneakers, apparel and accessories, with a community of over 25M members across 164 countries. Daniel's experience includes 5+ years at Uber as the Head of People Analytics (where he supported growth from 600 to 27,000+ employees globally), as well as a number of years at Google in various roles in the People space.

Thanks for reading, I hope you have enjoyed catching up on our latest news and stay tuned for more to come.

Best,
Mattias

🌓🔥