Estonian Business Angels Networks collects data from our members annually to have an overview of the investment trends, capability and also to get a picture of the available funding. The total investment sum during 2018, according to the survey, was €7,077,848, which was divided into 186 investments into 99 different companies.
The statistics compared to 2017 shows the decline in the investment sum from €11m due to many new funds investing into pre-seed/seed stage startups as well as the maturity of the market. Angels are making more calculated decisions with choosing rather than spraying&praying.
The preferred way of investing into startups in 2018 was still not alone but with fellow business angels (50% of the answers) or co-investing with a VC fund, family office, institutional investors (26%). Only 8% of the investors chose to invest alone into a company. 63% of the total of investments were made into Estonian companies.
Crowdfunding platforms are also on the rise as a tool for the syndicates, the most popular syndicates partaken by EstBAN members, were made using Funderbeam platform with Siidrikoda, with the whole round of €953 000.
The most popular field of investment is still unshakeably ICT, with 29% of angels choosing it as their target sector, although there was a significant rise from 2% to 9% compared to 2017 of funding manufacturing, mostly affected by the Nordic Angel Program batch 1 which chose Fractory.co as the receiver of €350k investment by the syndicate.
According to the survey, 5% of the exits were >10x return, 39% from companies located outside of EU, 33% in Estonia.
Times are changing fast, as is the norm in the dynamic startup ecosystem, so perhaps by the end of the year we’ll see new trends and change of scenery as well as new and powerful key players emerging, whether they are funds, very capable individuals or a team of strong group of investors. Nevertheless Estonian startup ecosystem is booming and the angel investors are of invaluable help for the pre-seed companies with their wide network, expertise and know-how.
EstBAN accepts members in an on-going process, please see more on https://estban.ee/for-investor/introduction, fill out an application and we’ll get back to you!
Results are based on 87 replies collected at the end of 2018. For a more elaborate overview of the data, see here.
