Austria’s start-ups collected a quarter more money from investors last year. Carinthian and Styrian start-ups are strongly represented in the top ten.
Austria’s start-ups collected a quarter more money from investors last year
The amount of public funding rose from 138 million euros (2018) to 173 million euros (2019). The highest financing was awarded to the Vienna travel platform TourRadar with 41 million euros.
The second highest investment went to the Carinthian video streaming start-up Bitmovin (€ 25 million), followed by the Styrian micro-speaker manufacturer USound (€ 17 million), the Viennese vaccine developer Themis Bioscience and the Tyrolean e-bike retailer Greenstorm Mobility (each 10 million euros), emerges from the EY start-up barometer. The mobile payment service Bluecode, headquartered in Vienna and the Swiss municipality of Lachen, received 11.2 million euros from investors, but was not counted in the EY statistics because its headquarters are in Switzerland.
Austria: Only 15th in Europe
Investors invested around 10 million euros in the Vorarlberg start-up crate.io last year – developers of a real-time SQL database, 6.5 million euros in the Viennese Bootvermittlung start-up. up Zizoo and each with over 5 million euros in the self-storage Storebox Vienna, the Graz Funktürschloss start-up Nuki, the Vienna sports software start-up Eversports and the Salzburg e-commerce start-up Findologic.
Overall, Austria ranked 15th in the EY ranking in European comparison. The number of financings increased from 35 to 71 in Austria in 2019. In the EY-Barometer, reports on rounds of financing without any claim to completeness are evaluated in cooperation with an external team of analysts. Only start-ups older than ten years will be considered. Financing rounds without concrete amount (“undisclosed”) were also counted.
Many smaller financings
“Despite all the euphoria we must not overlook that there are many small financings in Austria: The top 10 deals in Austria in 2019 had an average volume of 14 million euros – Switzerland is 63 million euros, Germany at 158 million euros.” , commented Thomas Gabriel, Partner and Head Start-up at EY Austria, in a release the current figures. In this country “the very big ideas for the very big capital injections” would still be missing. For Gabriel, the promotion and expansion of start-up ecosystems outside of Vienna has high priority. Since one is “on a very good way”. The start-ups with the Top 5 Financing of 2019 come from four different federal states.
In the past year, investors have also vigorously invested in start-ups all over Europe. According to EY, the total value of financing rose by 11 percent in 2018 to 21.3 billion euros compared to the previous year. The number of financing rounds increased by 15 percent to 4,199. Most of the money went to start-ups in the United Kingdom (7.2 billion euros / + 12 percent), Germany (4.6 billion euros / + 7 percent) and France (3.4 billion euros). The European start-up ecosystem also needs to be strengthened. In the US or China flow significantly more money and the number of rounds of financing was many times higher.
Also published on Medium.