Blog
2024: Year in Review
Dec 23, 2024
2024 has been an exciting year for VentureFriends, with four new investments and many of our portfolio companies continuing to deliver and raise significant funding rounds. Innovation isn’t tied to interest rates and we continue to be amazed by the quality of the teams we meet every week.
New Investments
We invested in 4 exciting startups, across France, Spain and the UK, as with many startups raising this year there was a strong AI theme. We’re excited to back these founders who are using AI to tackle huge markets.
Cube AI (Paris)— building AI-powered workflow automation for the logistics sector. VF led a $2.5M pre-seed round alongside Kima Ventures, Entrepreneur First, StemAI and top French angels.
Edgee (Paris) — building the edge computing platform that reduces data loss for user facing websites. Serena led the $2.9M pre-seed round alongside VF.
NeuralTrust (Barcelona) — a security platform for enterprises deploying generative AI. VF led the round joined by Seaya.
Merx (London) — the platform for AI conversational commerce, VF led their pre-seed round alongside Ascension.
VF Family
It was a stellar year for our portfolio companies, with many raising strong Series A and B rounds, in a very tough fundraising environment. It’s been a testament to the hard work put in by these teams and we’re excited to see them grow to the next stage.
Barte raised an $8M Series A led by AlleyCorp, they have had an amazing year growing more than 70x to $20M in revenues by year end. It’s been a privilege to back this team since it was just an idea, and we believe they will soon be the market leader in Brazil.
Harbor Lab raised a $15M Series A led by Atomico with VF, Notion and Speedinvest joining the round. Since their Seed round they have signed some of the biggest shipping companies globally, and recently shipped a new AI product which will revolutionise the port call process.
Huspy raised a new round of funding, led by Balderton Growth, they’re the market leader in the UAE for real estate services and are growing fast in Spain.
Blueground have raised a $45M funding round to consolidate their position as the leading platform for medium-term furnished apartment rentals.
Embat raised a €15M Series A led by Creandum, and joined by VF and Samaipata. They have been creating real value for CFOs by taking treasury management out of Excel and are expanding to Germany and the UK.
Plum raised a €19M Series B, now live in a number of countries across Europe, Plum has grown rapidly after launching the most competitive ISA account in the UK.
Carmoola raised £15.5M in equity led by Alley Corp alongside a new £100M debt facility to continue their strong growth in the UK market.
Simpler raised a €9M Series A to expand their one-click checkout offering across Europe.
Funding is always a key milestone for many startups, but it's also been great to see companies like Flexcar, WelcomePickups and JustLife become leaders in their markets and profitable!
Events
It was a busy year for events as we held dinners in Barcelona and Warsaw as well as our annual event in London. It’s always great to connect with so many amazing people in the VF network across Europe, and we left each one energised and full of new learnings.
We also held our VF Summit in Athens, with more than 100 founders, operators and investors joining us from across Europe and even further afield. We had some insightful sessions, finishing with a dinner below the Acropolis and continued with a boat trip around the coast the following day.
Finally, we ended the year with a startup movie night co-hosted at Deloitte's historic private screen in Athens. We had a conversation with George Hadjigeorgiou (CEO of Skroutz) who also picked the movie!
2025
Looking ahead to 2025, we’re incredibly optimistic about the European startup ecosystem. We're seeing the emergence of a confident European founder archetype - one that's not trying to copy Silicon Valley but is building on our continent's unique strengths. We have some incredible talent here and European startups are increasingly thinking globally from day one. The pieces are falling into place for Europe to cement its position as a major startup ecosystem, and we’re pleased to be able to back some of these teams at the beginning of their journey.
