The Venture Capital market exploded in 2021. With an 8% growth, Europe reached €118bn in fundraising. 841 funds raised capital, the highest number of funds ever recorded, 33% higher than the average number of funds from the last five years.
In parallel, a total of €138bn was invested in European companies in that same year, which represents an increase of 51% compared to 2020 (when €91bn was invested). As a result, 8,895 companies received funding (84% of them were SMEs), which accounts for an increase of 13% compared to the past five years.
Although 60% of equity investment was made within the country in 2021, 33% was intra-European and 6% came from outside sources (non-European). Most investments were made in ICT (37%), followed by consumer goods & services (17%), then biotech & healthcare (15%), and finally business products & services (13%).
Although the VC market has been affected in 2022 by the general economic stagnation, the VC market is expected to resume its growth soon.
Hundreds – if not thousands- of private and public funding programmes are launched every year
However, although data shows that the situation is quite positive for companies looking for funding, not all is a bed of roses. Today, entrepreneurs have to spend too much time in identifying, researching, assessing and comparing the many different funding options, and on several occasions, the information about these funding options is not reliable and very limited.
Even today, special care must be taken when searching for funding, since the information about funds is scattered, fragmented, limited and biased.
In addition, despite the number of platforms created to look for private funds, companies struggle to find what they actually want to find since said tools and platforms do not exactly fit the needs of the startups.
This is why we have created FundingTrip, the first online platform to provide insights and transparency about all funding options for startups, either public or private.
FundingTrip aspires to become the leading portal with information about public and private funds from all over the world by leveraging the latest NLP and web-crawling technologies, but also and even more importantly, by counting on the entrepreneurs and the investment ecosystem, who will be able to give feedback about their investors and funders and also to ask doubts about public and private funding programmes.
This is the beginning of a great platform for entrepreneurs. This is FundingTrip.
