Sifted - Klarna files for IPO

Good morning there,

It finally happened. Klarna has filed for its long-awaited IPO — and the Swedish buy now, pay later fintech has chosen the US over Europe. 

Its decision to list in the US is an example of the brain drain taking some of Europe’s largest players in the IPO pipeline across the pond, says PitchBook senior EMEA private capital analyst Navina Rajan. Still, European stock exchanges won’t be completely dry of new tech listings in the coming years. UK neobank Starling, for instance, has indicated the country is the logical place to list if and when it IPOs. 

Philip Belamant, CEO of fellow BNPL player Zilch, tells me that while the six-year-old UK-based company envisions listing in the next 18-24 months, it’s undecided on where — citing changes created by recent elections in the US and UK. 

“How will the world and this business look in two years?” he says. “It could look very different, so it’s very hard to say whether it would be here or there.” 

Elsewhere today: eagle-eyed London-based readers might have seen drones flying over the UK capital this week carrying packages for the NHS, as part of a partnership between drone software startup Apian, US drone maker Wing and the country’s national health service. 

They’ve been part of a pilot programme to deliver blood samples between two London hospitals, intending to get delivery times down from half an hour to a few minutes. It’s the first time drone deliveries have been approved in London by the aviation regulator, but as Apian founder Alexander Trewby told reporter Kai Nicol-Schwarz, it’s taken years to convince them.

Also today:

• Tangible raises £4m to help climate hardware access debt markets
• Sifted Leaderboard: France's 50 fastest-growing startups

— Tom Matsuda, fintech reporter

/A message from our sponsor FinCity.Tokyo

🙌 Klarna announced on Tuesday evening that it had “confidentially submitted” a draft registration statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, formally kicking off the process to become a publicly listed company in the US. 

• The US watchdog will review the filing over the next two months. 

💰 London-based Tangible has raised £4m from Future Positive Capital, Hardware Club VC, MMC, Blackwood and Systemiq.

• Tangible aims to help climate hardware and asset operators access debt markets. It helps companies to model the agreements they are pursuing, connects them with lenders and automates the reporting process once the debt deal is agreed. 

🇨🇭 Zurich-based VC Founderful has closed its second fund, of $140m, to back Swiss startups.

• The generalist VC will write cheques of €1.1m-1.6m in 40 pre-seed startups, making roughly 10 investments per year. It’ll save 40% of the capital for follow-on seed investments.
• Founderful partner Alex Stöckl tells Sifted he thinks not being part of the European Union means Switzerland has been “overlooked”, despite boasting top spinout university ETH Zurich as well as a strong flow of talent from Google and Nvidia. Many of Europe’s flagship funds such as the EIF, KfW and Bpifrance are all tied to EU or domestic allocations, he points out. 
• Stöckl is confident that’ll change though: “Now, we are in an era where tech means tech again, and there’s few places globally that are as attractive in terms of engineering education and local context for innovation as this charming and beautiful country.”

🇹🇷 Istanbul-based Bek Ventures, formerly known as Earlybird Digital East, has raised a new $250m fund to invest in eastern European and Turkish startups. The firm has spun off from the Earlybird family, which has separate VC and healthtech funds — as reported by Sifted earlier this year. 

• Earlybird Digital East is known for investing early in Romanian unicorn UiPath; its first fund generated a 20.4x return as a result of that deal. 
• Dan Lupu, the investor who led the deal into UiPath, has not stayed with Bek Ventures. He joined Earlybird as a venture partner in September. 

🇫🇷 Station F, the 50k sq m startup campus based in Paris, has published its annual list of the 40 best-performing companies it’s seen this year — out of the 1,000 startups that pass through its doors annually. Companies are selected based on criteria such as funds raised, revenues and international presence. 

• Out of 40 startups across all verticals, 34 use AI as a core technology — including materials discovery platform Entalpic and legaltech Jimini. 
• More than half of the batch are repeat founders. Home energy efficiency startup Kelvin, for instance, was founded by Clémentine Lalande, who founded dating app Once.
• The 40 startups together have raised €93m; 88% of that came from international investors.

Ooh la la: here are the 50 fastest-growing French startups

A plate of steak and chips “changed my life”, says Damien Soulard, cofounder of mobile app publisher Kovalee.

It was a Wednesday night in Paris in 2020, at popular steakhouse Hippopotamus — still the most famous hippo in the French capital, sorry Moo Deng — and Soulard had just hashed out a business idea to help consumer apps climb the charts with Vincent Hart de Keating, the cofounder of Homa Games, a Paris gaming app developer. Like any good startup origin tale, there were scribbles on a napkin that night. 

Things have moved quickly since: the company today boasts +626% two-year revenue growth, which is good enough to put it on top of our new leaderboard of fastest-growing French startups.

The Kovalee — then called Lumos — steakhouse origin story. Credit: Soulard’s LinkedIn

The second fastest-growing startup on the leaderboard is Paris-based Swan (558.17% CAGR), a fintech that helps companies set up banking features like accounts, cards and payments. Getting its paws on third spot is digital-first pet insurer Dalma (549.08% CAGR). Other buzzy names on the list include insurtech Descartes Underwriting, BNPL site Alma and carbon accounting platform Greenly (feel free to debate/fight with us on LinkedIn later over these picks). 

Plenty in France is changing: the pro-tech Macron government is on a slow fade, people are going gaga for a new kind of croissant (“Le crookie”) filled with cookie dough, Emily from Emily in Paris has moved to Rome (I forgot to say spoiler alert for season 4). There’s a massive shark in the Seine (oh wait, that’s another Netflix thing). 

The country has caught up tech-wise, having been, until recently, a long way behind places like the UK and Germany (France today has 60% more startups than it did in 2015). People are actually leaving their cushy Big Tech jobs for French AI startups (Pro subscribers can catch up on Mistral’s big Paris poach). 

Can the good times last? And will any of these fast-growing startups become world-conquering? My colleague Daphné [fun fact: her parents’ first date was at Hippopotamus] looks at French tech’s past and future here. 

— Éanna Kelly, contributing editor

🏥 An NHS pilot programme is using drones to carry blood samples between two hospitals in London, as part of a partnership between UK software startup Apian and Wing, a subsidiary of Alphabet and a graduate of its “moonshot factory”.

• The news follows years of promising moves for drone startups in Europe — from those delivering everyday items to others developing defence tech applications — but there have been few examples of chunky commercial deals rolled out at scale. That’s because of technical and regulatory challenges, industry stakeholders tell Sifted.
• “Drones have been overestimated in the short term, but underestimated in the long term,” says Alexander Trewby, CEO and cofounder of Apian — adding that infrastructure limitations in urban areas mean there’s big potential.

• Edtech was in a different stratosphere in the pandemic tech boom, as demand for remote learning skyrocketed and startups bagged megaround after megaround. 
• These days it’s quieter. Most founders have discovered that the main value of edtech resides in selling courses to businesses, not everyday consumers.
• Rapidly advancing AI is forcing companies to quickly bone up on new skills — that’s a tailwind for the industry. 
• But AI could also threaten the B2B edtech model by making it easier for companies to knock up their own training resources. Consider the tools provided by London-based Colossyan, which help companies turn text, PDFs and powerpoints into training videos. The company scored one of Europe’s biggest B2B edtech rounds of 2024 — a $22m Series A in February.

See who makes the grade in our new Pro B2B edtech briefing.

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Amsterdam-based Sympower, which provides energy management and virtual power plant tech, raised €21.3m in Series B funding. A&G Energy Transition Tech Fund led the round and was joined by investors including the EIF, Activate Capital, Rubio Impact Ventures, PDENH and Expon Capital. 

London-based Fleek, a wholesale secondhand marketplace, raised $20.4m in funding ($14.8m Series A; $5.6m seed). HV Capital led the Series A round and Andreessen Horowitz led the seed round. They were joined by investors including Finance YCombinator, Harley Finkelstein (Shopify president), Maria Raga (Depop ex-CEO) and Sean Plaice (Postmates CTO).

Zurich, Switzerland-based Wyden, a platform that streamlines digital assets trading, raised $16.9m in Series B funding. Truffle Capital led the round and was joined by investors including PostFinance, SBI-Sygnum-Azimut Digital Asset Opportunity Fund, FiveT Fintech and C3 Venture Capital.

Berlin-based mediaire, which uses AI tools to make MRI diagnostics more efficient, raised €12m in funding. LBO France led the round and was joined by investors including IBB Ventures and Wille Finance. 

Paris-based Prelude, which is building a fraud-resistant SMS verification API, raised $8m in seed funding. Singular and Seedcamp led the round.

Geneva, Switzerland-based Biolux Technology, which focuses on light-accelerated orthodontics, raised €4.2m in seed funding. Redalpine and Revere Partners led the round.

Oslo-based Atlas.co, which is developing a collaborative real-time mapping tool, raised $2m in pre-seed funding. Pale Blue Dot led the round and was joined by investors including Ben Lang (Notion ex-community lead), Andreas Klinger (Product Hunt ex-CTO).

Copenhagen-based NitroVolt, which is developing green ammonia, raised €3.5m in seed funding from investors including BackingMinds, EIFO, EQT Foundation, Satgana and DivisionM.

Naarden, Netherlands-based Phlox Therapeutics, which is working on RNA therapies for genetic laminopathies, raised €1.9m in funding from investors including ROM Utrecht Region.

Munich, Germany-based Feld.energy, which helps farmers use their land for electricity generation with photovoltaic systems, raised €1.7m in pre-seed funding. HV Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Angel Invest and CoInvest.

​​Munich, Germany-based Hula Earth, which uses sensors and satellites to monitor wildlife conservation and biodiversity, raised €1.6m in pre-seed funding. Point Nine Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Climate Founders, Partners in Clime, WithEarth, Lawrence Leuschner (Tier cofounder), Kilian Kaminsky (Refurbed cofounder), Florian Hildebrand (Greenlyte Carbon Technologies cofounder) and Markus Linder (Triple Impact Ventures founder).

London-based Coopah, a run coaching app, raised £1.5m in funding. Redrice Ventures and Active Partners led the round and were joined by investors including Amrock Ventures, Tom Singh (Rianta Capital), London Marathon Events, Alistair Brownlee (Olympic triathlete) and Ricky Simms (sports agent).

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