Kwaga, a Paris, France-based startup that specializes in tools to make email ‘smarter’ by leveraging semantic technology, has raised $1.55 million in Series A funding. The company, which received seed funding from Seedcamp and Kima Ventures after its founding in 2008, raised the money from unnamed private investors.
Read more at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
In this, our third installment of “Free Startup Tools”, we wanted to highlight an agreement launched by Seedcamp, the European startup accelerator, to help startup founders negotiate the early stages of building a company. (You can check out our first post on The Founder Institute’s effort to standardize the founder-advisor relationship and compensation here and the second post on a tool that helps founders compare their term sheets to the standards here.)
While we’ve touched on these better ways to negotiate term sheets and relationships with advisors, founding a company also often entails bringing on co-founders to help you build your business. Of course, in doing so, it’s important for co-founders to be able to establish a level of trust that allows each founding member to fairly share in the benefits of success. → Read More
As I wrote last week when Seedcamp made a flurry of announcements, including fresh funding and ambitious plans for international expansion, I spent some time in London last week to get acquainted with a bunch of interesting European startups.
Below is an overview of all 20 Seedcamp Week 2011 finalists, starting with the 3 (well, actually, 4 winners).
But first, it’s worth noting that Seedcamp, which had already financially and otherwise backed 16 of the 20 companies that presented their wares during Seedcamp Week 2011 – over and over, I might add – held interviews with the four remaining startups and decided to inject some seed capital into them, too. So, in a way, they all sorta kinda ‘won’. → Read More
I’ve spent the past couple of days in London getting caught up in the Seedcamp Week craziness, meeting some of Europe’s finest entrepreneurs and investors. Me and Mike Butcher will soon post a round-up of this year’s finalists (and highlight a few interesting ones separately), but first, Seedcamp has some – actually, a lot of – news of its own to announce today.
The organization, which combines an early-stage seed investment fund with a world-class mentoring program for European entrepreneurs, is expanding by striking a number of international partnerships, setting up new events (Seedhack), establishing an ‘experts-in-residence’ program and an impressive advisory board, raising more funding from a number of new strategic investors and strengthening its offering to fledgling companies with the help of several corporate sponsors. → Read More
What if we could combine top-notch hackers with leaders from across different companies? What if we could bring talented developers from all over Europe to create innovative solutions for organizations or sectors that desperately need them? Could this format potentially form great new startups that address untapped needs?
Those are the three rhetorical questions asked by Seedcamp, the well-known European early-stage seed investment fund and mentoring programme. In its quest to get answers to those questions, the company is organizing a new, totally free event called seedhack, which will be sort of like a hackaton – like the one we organize during TechCrunch Disrupt – but not just for programmers and designers. → Read More
Like a European AngelList, Seedcamp has put together the new Seedsummit site to showcase largely European Angels – although it does include US ones as well. It’s a sign that Seedcamp is becoming more international and less geographical. The initiative has grown out of a “Seedsummit” event which the programme put together in London last year where Angels chewed the fat about startups. Angel gate? Hardly – more like the first time European Angels had properly met eachother in a dedicated conference. The idea behind it was to help to create a forum for active European seed investors. Quite why it’s taken this long for them do a site off the back of the event is a mystery but those Seedcamp guys do travel a lot. → Read More
I have no idea why it seems to be “Europe week” for me, but here’s some more news from across the pond: Seedcamp has raised a new €3 million fund. I’m a huge fan of Seedcamp, even though I’ve given the co-founder Saul Klein a hard time about some of its winners in the past.
It is a combination of Y Combinator, a competition like TechCrunch Disrupt and a super angel, but one that aggressively takes itself on the road every month to find the best startups in emerging markets, particularly Eastern Europe. (It’s not unlike my own obsessive emerging market reporting. Oh wait, it’s completely different. They have actual money to invest.)
We caught up with Seedcamp’s other founder Reshma Sohoni to find out more about Seedcamp’s newly enlarged global ambitions. The video is below. → Read More
In this week’s show, we talk to one of our favorite angel investors, Saul Klein, who just wrapped up his third annual Seedcamp in London. In addition to being a partner at the powerful Index Ventures and having a British accent — which lonely expat Paul can’t get enough of– Klein is impressive because he’s one of the only angel investors who has made what is traditionally an intensely local way to invest work globally. He holds mini-Seedcamps all over the world, and the annual London event included entrepreneurs from 16 countries. Just two weeks ago, Fred Wilson gave Klein props as the guy to get to know if you are trying to start a company in a fringe market and don’t have a lot of investing contacts.
In this video, Klein tells us about the overall theme of this year’s Seedcamp, and we dig in on the company we liked the best (Spoiler Alert!) and the company we liked the least (Spoiler Alert!). We then ask him why with so much going on in fast-growing economies in Africa, South America, Asia and the Middle East we should still care about stodgy old London’s tech scene, and he gives a pretty good answer. We wrap up with a discussion about Klein’s latest experiment: He’s relocated to Israel for a year to figure out why returns have fallen off in a country with so much technical and entrepreneurial talent.
Then Paul and Sarah say goodbye to Klein and have a fight about incubators. Paul tells people to get on a plane to the Valley if they want to start a company; Sarah loses it and calls him names. A lot of eye-rolling ensues.
Video below. → Read More
Seedcamp Week, the week when the startup programme brings its pan-European travels to a head and lands in London, starts next week and they’ve released the startups they will be running through their intense mentoring wringer.
Over 600 teams applied over the last year of nine Mini Seedcamps, finally coming up with teams from 16 different countries and 19 different cities. Although Seedcamp pinged to South Africa, Israel and even Asia this year, their hard-core remains Europe, and the above data points show just how intense you have to be to suck out startups from such a wide area. If you’re just in Silicon Valley, thank your lucky stars you only have to drive up and down the 101.
Below is Seedcamp’s summary of the contenders. → Read More
Pan-european startup programme Seedcamp has released the names of the teams appearing at the Mini Seedcamp London next week. Seedcamp says they “saw many teams applying with innovative ideas in the mobile space and we are seeing more and more dedicated, smaller applications adressing very specific markets.”
Teams applied from all over Europe and beyond, and there is a trend towards self-financing and bootstrapping but the “quality [of teams] is growing from strength to strength each year”. Personally I am not surprised they are doing that given the dearth of early stage funding right now, but, perversely this lack of funding, especially in Europe, does rather concentrate the mind on what startups should be doing. There’s nothing like a downturn for sorting out the wheat from the chaff.
The below is a run-down on what the teams are doing, supplied by Seedcamp: → Read More
Seedcamp, the pan-European early stage startup programme that tours Europe to find companies for a week-long annual seed-funding event, has has given TechCrunch Europe exclusive access to its dates for 2010.
The original plan to hold a Seedcamp Week every year in London for a 3 year run, investing in a total of 15 companies in that period, has now changed. The emphasis is now on a regular touring programme of ‘mini-seedcamps’, a move pioneered this year with seven events.
In 2010 there will be 8 Mini Seedcamps (Spain is the new addition) and majoring on the Balkans and Eastern Europe which has produced previous Seedcamp finalists like Erply, Codility, Zemanta, Ubervu and Brainient. These dates will be: → Read More
Yesterday some of Europe’s most influential and active seed/angel investors got together in London for a ‘summit’ organised by Seedcamp, the pan European early stage startup programme. We understand the morning of SeedSummit (press weren’t invited) was devoted to frank exchanges between the investors about the current stage of early stage seed funding in Europe, with the afternoon reserved for a more public showcase of Seedcamp startup pitches.
Held at the offices of NESTA in London, the event was outlined by Seedcamp’s Saul Klein on his blog.
Attendees included around 60 people, including high profile investors like Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman, Lukasz Gadowski, Stefan Glaenzer, Dave McClure, Andy Philips, William Reeve, Robin Klein, Jyri Engestrom and Sherry Coutu. → Read More
Today Saul Klein, chairman and co-founder of Seedcamp, the pan-European programme for early stage startups, blogged a long post about Seedcamp’s structure and history. But over the last few weeks I’ve been meeting Saul to tease out, over long conversations, where Seedcamp is at and where it’s going.
The debate is an important one, in part because Seedcamp, as the only Pan-european YCombinator-style organisation, now has a position that is largely unmatched at this level. That is at once a great thing for Europe – afterall, there was nothing else like it before, and Europe really needed a pan-European Seed fund which could also educate young startups. It’s also a potential challenge both for Seedcamp to explain how it operates – after all, despite its laudable openness to date, let’s not forget it’s a business – and for those that want to sit outside the burgeoning Seedcamp ecosystem. → Read More
It’s been a big week for European entrepreneurship, what with 20+ startups emerging at Seedcamp and Dopplr getting picked up by Nokia (or does it just feel that way since I’m here with GeeksOnAPlane for the first time in four years?).
In any case, Seedcamp’s six winners were announced earlier today. If you’re not familiar with Seedcamp, it’s a startup mentorship and funding program for European entrepreneurs that shares basic tenets with US-based Y Combinator and TechStars, among several others. I had the opportunity to sit down on Wednesday with Seedcamp founder Saul Klein and ask him about a variety of topics ranging from the idiosyncrasies of European entrepreneurship to Spotify, smart energy, and the real-time web. In addition to founding Seedcamp, Klein is a partner at Index Ventures and a founding partner at The Accelerator Group (TAG).
A transcript of the interview follows below. → Read More
Seedcamp, the European-wide programme for tech startups, has opened its annual week of supercharged mentoring for its final list of 20 startups.
There are other startup programmes and competitions in Europe but Seedcamp seems to have cornered the market in that scare resource: smart European tech CEOs who can mentor new startups.
Put simply, if you’d thrown a grenade into the Costa Coffee at University College London today much of the tech startup scene in Europe would have been wiped out. Which would be a pity. But back to the startups: What are the trends this year? → Read More
Seedcamp – the rolling European startups programme which started out as an annual competition and which has morphed into a pan-European network of mentors, investors and startups – will today announce it’s list of startups that have made the cut for Seedcamp Week in a fortnight’s time in London. But at a press conference in London CEO Reshma Sohoni and Chairman Saul Klein also gave out some fascinating data which (and I checked) we can share with you now, prior to the list announcement shortly. [Update: Here's the list].
The data points are interesting because they show the trends in how tech companies are being formed from the primordial soup of Europe’s startup scene and which trends are emerging. → Read More
Washington D.C. based LaunchBoxDigital, a Y Combinator-like startup incubator that will invest small amounts of capital in very early stage startup ideas, is now taking applications for their first program. They’ve also raised their own first round of funding – $250,000 from Jonathan Miller (former CEO, AOL), Reed Hundt (former FCC Chairman), Raul Fernandez (CEO Object Video) and Chris Schroeder (CEO HealthCentral). LaunchBoxDigital says they’ll invest $15,000 – $30,000 in six to ten startups, in exchange for 4% to 8% of the equity. Founding teams must spend the summer in Washington D.C. to participate in a twelve week incubation program. Applications must be received by March 14, 2008. The model is based on the much emulated Y Combinator, which has now funded dozens of startups. London based SeedCamp and Colorado based TechStars have nearly identical business models. CrunchBase Information LaunchBoxDigital Y Combinator Seedcamp TechStars Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
We are hosting a party in central London next week on Thursday, September 6 to support the Seedcamp event and to announce some TechCrunch UK news. Most of the spots are reserved for Seedcamp attendees, but we are opening up 100 tickets to the public as well. To discourage no shows, we are charging a £10 fee per ticket, which will be donated to charity. Tickets are available here. There will be plenty to drink (and we’re working on food), and we’ll be giving away a ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch20 conference. I will be flying in to London for the Seedcamp event and to attend the party. Hope to see you there. We are taking a limited number of sponsors to offset the cost of the event. Email Jeanne Logozzo for more information about sponsoring the party. → Read More
Seedcamp, a European Y Combinator-like seed fund and mentoring program, has announced the final twenty candidates for funding. Next week, five of the twenty startup ideas will be funded, each receiving €50,000 to build out their business. We are one of the media sponsors of the program. In all, 240 applications were received from 40 countries. SeedCamp Finalists Company Location Description ArtFlock.com UK ArtFlock.com aims to be the foremost online destination for the sale and promotion of original art and craft by the worlds’ freshest artists and makers Avenue7 London, UK An online community for 12 – 17 year old girls to share ideas on the latest fashion trends & products, as well as their own personal styles Buildersite London, UK Buildersite is a web-marketplace for construction services. We aim to provide homeowners and tradesmen with the largest and most trusted venue for transacting business online Content Syndicate Dubai, United Arab Emirates Helps content providers and buyers commission, distribute, buy and sell content, that’s exclusive, customised and personalised for their requirements Debatewise London, UK Debatewise will enable people to compare the collective wisdom of one side of a debate with the collective wisdom of their opponents, to help them make up their mind about anything Facecontact Moscow, Russia Facecontact.com is a simple and effective tool for referral tracking and reward administration for referring job candidates, clients, investors and other prospects KillSushi Cadiz, Spain Krogos Software Development Bucharest, Romania Software development boutique Kublax London, UK Online personal finance management service Maple and Leek London, UK A social networking site aimed at inspiring like minded over 50s to build an online community of friends and fellow explorers OpenEra UK Online real estate information systems provider and the developer of the new and exciting Reavia portfolio collaboration service Picolex Paris, France Project Playfair Edinburgh, Scotland Our game is hypernumbers which will do to numbers what hypertext did to text Price Delivered London, UK The place for consumers to discover and share genuine bargains RentMineOnline Amsterdam, Netherlands Trusted online rental market The School of Everything London, UK The place to come to find independent teachers and classes in anything and everything Tablefinder Sweden Tablefinders’ mission is to aggregate the world’s online bookable restaurants through an awarding and open community Tickex London, UK Tickex is a search engine for tickets to live events – concert, theatre and sports. In one search, Tickex aggregates results from → Read More
We’re pleased to announce that TechCrunch has partnered to support the launch of SeedCamp in Europe. Inspired by YCombinator and the OpenCoffeeClub, Seedcamp will be a week long event in London, September 3-7, for twenty young entrepreneurs to showcase their early-stage strategies and product concepts. The mission of Seedcamp is to develop the next generation of entrepreneurs in Europe by providing the money, mentoring and media to help propel forward great ideas. At the end of the week, Seedcamp will invest €50K for a 10% stake in each of final five teams and provide ongoing mentorship and support for three months in preparation for the companies’ formal rounds of financing. Applications are due August 12th. TechCrunch and the Financial Times are the exclusive media partners for Seedcamp. We’re supporting Seedcamp because we believe that it will help incubate some great new products from young entrepreneurs in Europe, and we’re enthusiastic to provide exposure to this new initiative and expand our editorial coverage internationally. We have no financial interest in the venture. The idea for Seedcamp came from Saul Klein in a post earlier this year looking to energize the European startup community. Participating VCs and advisors include Index Ventures, Atomico Investments, Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital, TAG, Forsyth Group and Brown Rudnick. We’ll also be hosting a TechCrunch Meet-Up one night in London during the week of Seedcamp. More details on that to follow. → Read More
