Creandum gets US university backing - will Europe follow suit? 

Good morning there,

VC firm Creandum has raised €500m for its seventh fund which will back early-stage startups in Europe. It says it raised the fund in just 12 weeks — but that’s not the only interesting nugget. Among its LPs are some of the US’s biggest university endowment funds. I get into that below. 

Elsewhere, UK neobank Monzo released its latest financial results yesterday. It posted a pre-tax profit of £15.4m for the 12 months to the end of March this year, compared to a £116m loss the year before. It’s the first time it has reported a full-year profit. Revenues also more than doubled from £355.6m to £880m.

And finally… Zurich-based spend management startup Yokoy has topped the newly launched Sifted 30: Central Europe Leaderboard — a ranking of the 30 startups with the strongest revenue growth over the past three financial years across Czech Republic, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and Poland. It achieved a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 281.88% across the past three financial years. You can see the full ranking here.

— Mimi Billing, Europe editor

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Creandum gets US university backing - will Europe follow suit?

European VC firm Creandum announced yesterday that it had closed its seventh fund — a €500m pot to back early-stage investments in Europe — in just 12 weeks. But that’s not the only news that caught my eye.

The fund’s LP base includes five of the eight largest US university endowments, pension funds and foundations. Pension funds being deployed into VC is common in places like the Nordics, but it’s rarer to see endowments backing firms. 

Creandum partner Staffan Helgesson told me he can’t say which universities have invested in the fund. The biggest endowment funds, though, belong to Stanford, Harvard and Yale, which all have tens of billions of dollars to their name. 

“[Universities] have backed us for a long time, we just never thought of sharing it,” he said. “We only have one LP since the beginning that decided to stop investing in us, so we only have space to let in one to three new investors for each fund.”

It was Yale’s former endowment head, the late David Swensen, who pioneered the current model of diversifying endowment investments by putting some capital into asset classes like VC and private equity. When he took over Yale's fund in 1985 it was worth around $1bn; it hit $42bn in 2021, according to Yale. Others in the US followed.

I asked Helgesson why we don’t see similar behaviour from the European universities that have big enough endowments, which is when he told me that one of Creandum’s 30 LPs is a university endowment fund based somewhere in Northern Europe (not the Nordics). He wouldn’t tell me which one. 

He also told me that 80% of Creandum’s funds come from pension funds, university endowments and foundations. “This gives us more motivation,” he said, adding that Creandum will never raise capital from the Gulf, China or oil money.

I’ve not come across a press release that mentions university endowments as LPs in European VCs before, so I left the conversation with Helgesson wondering a few things. Which European university is copying its US counterparts and investing in VC? Are some European endowment funds more active as LPs in Europe than I thought? And if not, should they be? If you know more, let me know.

— Mimi Billing, Europe editor

Meet Central Europe’s fastest-growing startups

Dive into our latest regional leaderboard ranking the fastest-growing companies on a high-growth trajectory across Central Europe, from CFO tech stacks, to carbon tech to fincrime.

📈 UK neobank Monzo has posted its first full-year profit as high interest rates and a growth in subscriptions buoyed revenues. According to its latest financial results, Monzo posted a pre-tax profit of £15.4m for the 12 months to the end of March this year, compared to a £116m loss the previous financial year.

• The digital bank has also announced plans to launch in the EU — starting with Ireland, where it’s opening an office.

💸 Swedish startup Aira has secured a €200m debt vehicle from French bank BNP Paribas to fund the rollout of heat pumps to customers. The climate tech is the latest in a string of domestic energy tech suppliers to secure debt vehicles to power their rollouts. 

• Aira was founded in 2022 by Vargas, the Swedish fund and company builder that’s also behind climate tech unicorns Northvolt and H2 Green Steel.

🤩 Zurich-based spend management startup Yokoy has topped the Sifted 30: Central Europe Leaderboard of startups in the region with the fastest-growing revenues. The five-year-old fintech, backed by VCs like Sequoia and Balderton, achieved a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 281.8% over the past three financial years.

• The 30 companies on the list have raised a total of €850m in funding and generated €792m in revenue over the past three financial years, averaging a two-year CAGR of 125%. On average they employ 85 people. 
• Seven of the 30 are climate tech companies, including second-placed Neustark, from Switzerland. It had a CAGR of 270.93%. Sifted’s Freya Pratty looked into climate tech business models that were bringing in the money here.

💰 Swedish e-van manufacturer Volta Trucks’ founder Carl-Magnus Norden is back with a new e-truck startup, Decade Energy, and has raised a €3.6m seed round from German VC Ananda Impact Ventures and Lithuanian net-zero investor Contrarian Ventures. The new company will provide a software platform to help truck operators make the switch to electric fleets. 

• The decision to launch a software company comes during a tough time for electric vehicle manufacturers. Volta filed for bankruptcy at the end of 2023 and was purchased last December by a New York-based hedge fund, Luxor Capital Group — while the UK’s e-van startup Arrival also recently filed for administration.

👀 How Personio built an $8.5bn business — and plans to keep growing. Since being founded in 2015, HR tech Personio has grown to 12k customers across 70 countries, and has 2,000 employees across eight offices. But while it has earned its place as one of the most valuable private tech companies in Europe, it still has much to do; so far, it’s captured 0.6% of its market in Europe, says CEO and cofounder Hanno Renner.

• Stimulating growth as a company of Personio’s size can, however, be tricky. “Maintaining the level we’re at now and adding hundreds of million in revenues obviously starts to become more challenging; it’s the nature of scale,” says Renner. 
• One way Personio is trying to do that is by expanding its product range. Another is increasing the number of mid-market customers (businesses of 200-2k employees) that it has on its books.
• Going public is also on the cards, but Renner couldn’t say when or where an IPO would take place. He says his ambition has remained the same since he started the company nine years ago: to be a “category-leading software company that is globally relevant, but that remains a European company at heart.”

🙋‍♀️ 350+ female VC partners in Europe: the complete and updated list — if we’ve left anyone off, let us know!

🏅 Foodtech needs a publicity boost - and these awards are hoping to platform the best. (Sponsored by Growing Further)

Groningen, Netherlands-based BioBTX, which wants to build a renewable chemicals plant to replace fossil fuel resources with biomass and plastic waste, raised €80m in funding (€42m in equity; €19m in debt; remainder grant funding) from investors including Invest-NL, Infinity Recyclo, Covestro, Carduso Capital, NOM and Groninger Groeifonds. Polestar Capital Circular Debt Fund and the Province of Groningen provided debt funding and grant funding came from the Dutch Government. 

Lausanne, Switzerland-based NEURAL CONCEPT, which helps engineering teams develop better products faster using AI, raised $27m in Series B funding. Forestay Capital led the round and was joined by investors including the D. E. Shaw group, Alven, CNB Capital, HTGF and Aster Group.

Paris-based Gireve, a platform that helps users find EV charging points, raised €20m in funding. Partech led the round and was joined by investors including Groupe EDF, ENEDIS, the Banque des Territoires and Demeter.

Madrid-basd Bcas, which offers a flexible financing solution for students to fund their education, raised €17m in funding from investors including MyInvestor and Actyus.

Amsterdam-based Carv, which uses AI tools to streamline recruitment processes, raised $10m in seed funding from investors including Global Founders Capital.

Paris-based malibou, a payroll and HR management platform for SMEs, raised €3m in funding from investors including Breega, Y Combinator and FCVC.

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