Never before has there been so much money for startups in Germany as today. As the consulting firm EY determined in its current startup barometer, 4.6 billion euros flowed into German startups in 2018 over 615 financing rounds. That was at least 21 percent more financing rounds and 290 million euros more than in 2017. Especially in the second half of the year, the deal volume rose to a record level in the last five years. However, the value nevertheless remained around 15 percent behind that of the first half of the year.
Berlin, number one startup location
If you break that down into federal states, Berlin remains the number one startup location. With 247 rounds of financing, the capital accounted for around 40 percent of total financing. Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg and Baden-Wuerttemberg follow on further places by far. After all, the number of Bavarians rose from 76 to 124 – a veritable technology boom in the Free State. All in all, all federal states recorded an increase over the previous year. 59 percent of the total invested money flowed to Berlin – a total of 2.64 billion euros. Again, Bavaria lands in second place with only 18 percent of the invested sums.
The numbers: e-commerce
Looking at investments by sector, e-commerce is at 1.64 billion euros, followed by software, analytics and cloud services with 670 million euros invested. Close behind the Fintech sector with 659 million euros, followed by Mobility and Health. The picture looks a bit different when you look at the number of rounds of financing: Here, the software and analytics sector (148 financing rounds) is well ahead of e-commerce, followed by health, fintech and mobility. Thus, the financial needs in the software sector is apparently smaller than in the e-commerce environment.
Overall, the EY startup barometer is 13 percent more deals below the ten-million-euro mark, but also the number of big deals with more than 50 million euros rose from eleven to 13. The top 5 deals in Germany were, we will surely remember some, Auto1 with 460 million euros before About you (264 million euros), Home24, GoEuro and N26. By the way, at N26, EY only counts the round of financing in March, while the new deal from last week (with at least 260 million euros) has not yet been considered.
How is the blockchain sector?
The blockchain sector has increased more than tenfold in terms of venture capital from nine to 95 euros, and the other topics in the software and analytics environment have also recorded considerable growth rates. Properly getting money is – given the right business model and convincing numbers – apparently in the fintech sector at the moment. Here in just two rounds of financing 189 million euros were taken.
Also published on Medium.