There are some exciting trends in the FinTech sector. It becomes clear: There is a mega-topic, which was particularly important in the past year and for which investors had a lot of money left over.
659 million euros for German fintechs
The year 2018 was a record year for the start-ups in Germany. Never before have companies had so much money available today. As the management consultancy EY determined in the context of its current startup barometer, last year proudly 4.6 billion euros flowed into German companies in the course of 615 financing rounds. That was at least 21 percent more financing rounds and 290 million euros more than in the previous year. Looking at just Q3 and Q4, the volume of completed rounds of financing also rose to a record level since EY’s periodic studies on this topic have been completed. Nevertheless, the value was around 15 percent behind that of the first half of the year, which is not unusual.
The view of the German FinTech start-ups is also exciting. Here, 659 million euros were invested last year – an increase of around 22 per cent to 541 million in 2017 compared to the previous year. The biggest financial influx was in the banking sector: in just two rounds of financing, 189 million euros of investment capital came together. Namely N26 managed the fifth largest round of financing of all considered sectors with 132 million euros – and of course EY does not even count the record investment of last week (after all 260 million euros).
Another possitions
In second and third place in the FinTech sector (behind banking) are the Insurance and Saving subsectors, which achieved investment volumes of 148 million and 110 million euros, respectively. Last year, the lending sector was still the one with the most investment capital (249 million euros) – here in 2018 just 33 million euros flowed.
If one classifies this (across all sectors) into federal states, Berlin remains the number one startup location. With 247 rounds of financing, the capital accounted for around 40 percent of total financing. Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg and Baden-Wuerttemberg follow on further places by far. After all, the number of Bavarians rose from 76 to 124 – a veritable technology boom in the Free State. All in all, all federal states recorded an increase over the previous year. 59 percent of the total invested money flowed to Berlin – a total of 2.64 billion euros. Again, Bavaria lands in second place with only 18 percent of the invested sums.
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Overall, the EY startup barometer is 13 percent more deals below the ten-million-euro mark, but also the number of big deals with more than 50 million euros rose from eleven to 13. The top 5 deals in Germany were, we will surely remember some, Auto1 with 460 million euros before About you (264 million euros), Home24, GoEuro and N26.