Austria’s start-ups collected a quarter more money from investors last year. The amount of publicly-known financing rose from € 138 million (2017) to € 173 million (2018), according to a study published by the consulting firm EY (Ernst & Young).
The highest and lowest investments
The highest financing was awarded to the Vienna travel platform TourRadar with 41 million euros. The second highest investment went to the Carinthian video streaming start-up Bitmovin (EUR 25 million), followed by the Styrian micro-speaker manufacturer USound (EUR 17 million), Viennese vaccine developer Themis Bioscience and Tyrolean e-bike retailer Greenstorm Mobility (€ 10 million each), according to the EY start-up barometer. The mobile payment service Bluecode, headquartered in Vienna and the Swiss municipality of Lachen, received EUR 11.2 million from investors, but was not counted in the EY statistics because its headquarters are in Switzerland.
Investors invested about 10 million euros in the Vorarlberg start-up crate.io last year – developer of a real-time SQL database, 6.5 million euros in the Vienna Bootvermittlung start-up. up Zizoo and each with more than 5 million euros in the self-storage start-up store Storebox, the Graz Funktürschloss start-up Nuki, the Vienna sports software start-up Eversports and the Salzburg e-commerce start-up Findologic.
Money in Austria in 15th place
Overall, Austria ranked 15th in the EY ranking in European comparison. The number of financings increased from 35 to 71 in Austria in 2018. In the EY-Barometer, reports on rounds of financing without any claim to completeness are evaluated in cooperation with an external team of analysts. Only start-ups older than ten years will be considered. Financing rounds without concrete amount (“undisclosed”) were also counted.
“Big ideas for very large capital injections are missing”
“Despite all the euphoria we must not overlook that there are many small financings in Austria: The top 10 deals in Austria in 2018 had an average volume of 14 million euros – Switzerland is 63 million euros, Germany at 158 million euros.” , commented Thomas Gabriel, Partner and Head Start-up at EY Austria, the latest figures. In this country “the very big ideas for the very big capital injections” would still be missing. For Gabriel, the promotion and expansion of start-up ecosystems outside of Vienna has high priority. Since one is “on a very good way”. The start-ups with the Top 5 Financing of 2018 come from four different federal states.
Last year, investors also invested heavily in start-ups all over Europe. According to EY, the total value of financing rose by 11 percent in 2018 to 21.3 billion euros compared to the previous year. The number of financing rounds increased by 15 percent to 4,199. The largest amount of money went to startups in the United Kingdom (€ 7.2bn / + 12%), Germany (€ 4.6bn / + 7%) and France (€ 3.4bn). The European start-up ecosystem also needs to be strengthened, according to EY consultant Gabriel. In the US or China flow significantly more money and the number of rounds of financing was many times higher.
Also published on Medium.