News from our partner, Atomico:
Today we are proud to announce our new fund. At $765m Atomico IV is one of the largest venture capital funds ever raised in Europe and will enable us to do more of what we love: work with the most ambitious founders who combine disruptive technology with the vision to build global category winners.
We’ll continue to invest in companies, from Series A onwards, that have achieved product market fit and are ready to scale. You can read our manifesto that guides every decision we make here.
Raising a fund of this size is testament to the growing confidence in European tech – which we have championed from the start – and our unique approach to partnering with founders to help them build successful companies and accelerate growth. When we invest in a company, we give everything we have, not just capital.
That’s because we’ve been there and done it, which means we have a deep respect for our founders and are humbled to be part of building their companies. We’ve always had strong founder DNA and a laser focus on growth acceleration, and today we are a team of over 40 people – including founders and executives with deep operational expertise from the world’s fastest growing companies, such as Facebook, Google, LastMinute.com, Skype, Spotify, Uber and Virgin. We use that experience to coach and push entrepreneurs, hard, in areas where they need help the most, like user growth, hiring and retaining the best talent, market-entry and partnerships, or marketing and communications.
We’re excited that we’re now in a position to invest one of Europe’s largest funds and deploy Europe’s most experienced venture team to partner with even more superstar founders. As our State of European Tech 2016 report shows, the European ecosystem and the pipeline of new talent has never been healthier. Today there are 4.7 million professional developers in Europe and more than 20% of European MBA graduates are going into tech. In 2016 over 150 cities hosted 50 or more tech meet-ups, and in total $14B was invested across 2800+ rounds. In the past 12 months most of these rounds were at seed and series A, and the conversion rate to later stage is still relatively low. Atomico IV will help to redress this balance by backing companies at the point they are ready to go global – at Series A and beyond, for the whole journey.
Since we launched Atomico in 2006, we’ve partnered with some incredible companies – such as Klarna, Rovio, Supercell, The Climate Corporation, GoEuro and Skype, and in the last few months we’ve invested in growing companies spanning a range of sectors and tech hubs – Pipedrive, Bitmovin, Scandit, Lilium and Uniplaces to name a few. Over the coming months we’ll be spending even more time meeting ambitious founders who are using disruptive technology to change industries and the way we live – we can’t wait to partner with them.