After the success of the technology community Stateside, particularly in Silicon Valley, investors are now increasingly looking to Europe as a hub for technology startups.
Irish founded Venture Capital firm, Frontline Ventures, which invests in B2B companies on both sides of the Atlantic have launched a 70m Euro fund called Frontline Seed Fund, to help technology startups, which are at pre-product, pre-seed or seed stage in Europe and have ambitions to move into the US market. Set up by Will Prendergast, William McQuillan and Shay Garvey in 2012, this new fund the firm has launched has helped 70 businesses, with 75% raising an up-round. Frontline previously launched Frontline X, a growth stage fund for US companies wanting to expand to Europe. Although Frontline recognised European expansion as a lucrative strategy for US founded B2B software companies, the fund published a report where it details that Europe is a bigger opportunity for growth than most realise, as it has an abundance of talent as well as a customer base. The report states that popular B2B software companies such as Dropbox, Slack and Hubspot have gained 25%-35% of their total global revenue from Europe, by the time they go public. Frontline has invested in many successful startups in the US and beyond, such as Irish retail startup Pointy, which was recently acquired by Google. Frontline describe themselves as ‘experts in expansion’ and the addition of this new European focused fund will enable them to make their expertise available to startups coming out of the continent. The funds advisors also make up leadership at some of the top B2B technology companies in the world, such as Linkedin, Google and Stripe.
As startups look for new horizons to expand their product and customer base, expansion between Europe and the US is ripe for opportunities and Frontline has been dedicating resources to this space since its inception in 2012. We hope to see many more B2B startups moving between these continents in the near future and there is no doubt that this is an area that investors will increasingly move towards funding.
