CEE Rounds Review #JUL’20

We all know that in VC, summer months are not the most active in the year. Many people take time off and usually not many deals get done across July and August. The common wisdom is that deals which were in the works over Spring, usually tend to close in June. With many people on vacation, July and August are probably not the best months to announce anything if you want to pick up some interest.

This year is even more difficult because of a global pandemic we have been battling with over several months. With Covid19 still raging across the globe, I suspected an even steeper decline in deal volume. Just as a reference, looking at Jul’19 there were 51 rounds announced across the CEE. This year, we saw 19 announcements being made in July. On a year-on-year basis, this represents a drop of ~63%. On a month-to-month basis, July was better than June, as 10 more rounds were announced. Again, I’m only looking at this as a directional insight as we don’t know how accurate the Crunchbase data really is.

This has been several months now, where I observed a drop in round announcements on a year-on-year basis. I am curious about your opinion as to why that is.

Some obvious reasons:

• Covid19 slowed down the pace at which capital is deployed (there is still a lot of dry powder across the CEE)
• Not enough interesting or ambitious enough ideas/companies in the region
• Funds and companies don’t care to announce rounds (too much noise anyway)

If you have any thoughts on this, please shoot me an email or reply in the comments.

Please find below the data for Jul’20

• 19 rounds announced
• ~ €36M raised (all rounds converted into EUR)
• The largest round was raised by Veriff (announcement) ~ €13M
• Outside of local VCs I only picked up two international names Y Combinator and Mosaic
• Estonia was the most active country with 5 rounds