Iceland Q4 2015 Funding Analysis

We start the year 2016 off with a roundup and analysis of the Q4 funding numbers for Iceland. Norðurskautið has been documenting and publicizing investments since it started, and these analysis will be recurring content on the site. To kick things off, we’d like to establish our methodology, as to explain any possible discrepancies appearing between our analysis and those of other news agencies

Our Method

• The funding analysis focuses on investments from investors, such as angels or institutions. Grants are not a part of these analyses.
• We strive to include all funding events based on when they’re signed. That means, that if we have knowledge of investments that haven’t been published, we will still include them in our aggregate numbers.
• We try our best to keep a balance of privacy and transparency. We respect the privacy of companies who wish to keep their investment private, but try to use those numbers in aggregate, if possible. This is to maximize the validity and coverage of our analyses, whilst recognizing companies’ wishes for privacy.

Totals

In Q4, we had a total of 9 investments totalling just under 6 billion ISK (~$45.6 m). The lion’s share of that cash went to CCP in a $30 million (~3.9bn ISK) investment led by NEA in November. The average investment (not calculating the CCP outlier in the average) was around $1.9 million (~253m ISK) and the median investment was $2.1 million (270m ISK).

Top 5 investments

The following graph shows the top 5 investments by size in Q4 2015. This clearly shows the massive difference between CCP and the other investments in the quarter.

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Funding rounds

We categorise the investments by venture capital financing round based on several factors. For some of the investments, an official statement is released declaring the venture round of the investment.. For investments not classified as a specific round we use the following indicators:

• Size of round: For example, rounds up to $1.5 million are generally classified as seed rounds.
• Previous rounds: If the round is a second or later funding round, we generally consider it a Series A (or later).
• Age and status of company: Whether the company has a product, how old it is, what the money will be used for, etc.

Who’s investing?

Although this quarter was the most active by Icelandic VC’s we’ve seen in a while, the vast majority of cash came from outside Iceland, mostly due to NEA’s investment.//e.infogr.am/js/embed.js?Q3WThis image is skewed though, because of NEA’s investment. But we can see that all the Icelandic funds (Brunnur, Frumtak 2, Eyrir Sprotar and NSA Ventures) have been active in the quarter.//e.infogr.am/js/embed.js?e7WUsing the quarter’s information we can estimate the status of the funds in terms of deployed and non-deployed capital. We only have information on the funds Brunnur and Frumtak 2.//e.infogr.am/js/embed.js?oQf

Last year’s appearance of new VC funds is starting to heat up the Icelandic startup space, and it will be exciting to follow their investments in the coming quarters.

Norðurskautið covers the Icelandic Startup and Tech scene. Follow us on Twitter or sign up for our mailing list to keep up to date. You can also join our Slack community – http://bit.ly/slack-is

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