The Year of the Seed Round: The 2017 Funding Report

The past year had several interesting highlights when looking at the funding landscape. The $240m monster round invested in WuXi NextCODE, the first investment from Index Ventures, and the first Icelandic startup (that we know of) to receive investment from only foreign sources – Authenteq. In this funding report we’ll go over the highlevel datapoints and discuss the developments in the ecosystem.

Note: Although based on Icelandic innovation, we decided not to include the WuXi NextCODE funding round in our analysis.

A record number of investments

This year surpassed 2016’s record in terms of tracked investments, with 22  investments on record. The number of investments is growing, albeit slowly, but whether that is due to more investments or better availability of data is uncertain.

But amount invested has declined

At the same time that we’ve never recorded as many investments, the amount recorded has declined. The total investment amount this year was around $35m, down from roughly $57m last year and ~$190m in 2015, which included three big investments that skew the comparison.

Never as much capital in early stage

Probably the most telling graph of this report is the following one where we look at the amount of capital that comes from smaller early stage rounds ($2.4m or less) and bigger, later stage round ($2.5m and up).

In 2017, almost half of all invested capital was in smaller rounds. This is massive change from earlier years where most of the capital invested came from larger rounds, often made by international investors.

This also shows when we break down the number of rounds per year into size brackets. In 2017, the overview is very much skewed to the left: that is, most rounds are small and we don’t have bigger rounds to balance it out.

This is echoed in the fact that only four (~19%) of the investments made in 2017 included foreign investors: Meniga, Teatime Games, Authenteq, and Takumi.

Another interesting point is that Investa, the early stage investment fund run by the likes of Hjálmar Gíslason, Hilmar Gunnarsson and Jói Sig, was the most active investor in the Icelandic ecosystem. They invested in three companies: Teatime Games, Viska Learning and Travelade.

Five investors’ first investment in Iceland

Although we saw fewer rounds with international investors, we added to the list of foreign VC’s that have invested in Icelandic companies. In addition, we saw (to our knowledge) the first seed round entirely funded by foreign investors, when Authenteq raised $1.3m. The new investors can be seen below:

No signs of seasonality yet

We’ve tried to use the data to build up some kind of projections or high-level overview of when investments happen in Iceland, but haven’t been succesful. We can’t see any seasonality in the data, which suggests that summer is just a good a time for raising money as winter. However, we have too little data for any analysis on this to have real meaning.

Exits

One of the most important stories of the year, was of NetApp’s acquisition of Greenqloud for $51m in cash. It profited all the investors (one of which has already invested in another startup), and the fact that NetApp looks to further develop the office in Reykjavik is great news for the tech ecosystem.

Another, smaller and less publicised exit was the sale of audiobook publisher Skynjun to Swedish Storytel for €200k.

What it means in the bigger picture

A lot of small, early stage investments in one year suggests that – if the companies are successful – we’ll see more bigger rounds in the upcoming 12-24 months. This, in fact, is already showing. In the first two weeks of 2018, three investments were announced: Oculus’ $20.3 Series B, Solid Clouds $2.5m Series A and a convertible bond by Kerecis. All three had previously raised smaller amounts from Icelandic investors.

Other “Icelandic” companies in the wild

Apart from the startups and tech companies in Iceland that we track, there are Icelander founded or co-founded companies that raised capital this year:

• Klang Games, maker of the endless runner ReRunner, and now working on Seed, a simulation where the goal is to ensure the survival of humanity. The founding team includes Oddur Snær Magnússon, Ívar Emilsson and Mundi Vondi.
• Catapult, a on demand staffing platform that helps people get temporary work and companies get workers, co-founded by Óli Johnson
• Vitro Labs, a biotech company that’s working on 3D tissue engineering and went through Y Combinator in 2017. Co-founded by Ingvar Helgason

Note: While we try to catch all investments, we never can. We mostly look to specific funding rounds, and don’t go after things like bridge loans or funding extensions, although we do cover them when the data is readily available. We time the investments based on their announcement, not the date of signing. Our methods and rules are there to try to ensure compatability with other databases and data sources.