Billion-dollar start-ups are spreading across Europe at a rapid rate. US VC firms have taken notice. But do hubs in London and Paris really have an advantage over Silicon Valley?  Once considered a frontier market by VCs in Silicon Valley, Europe has developed a network which currently leads the industry by several measures.  Of the total number of unicorns created there – start-ups valued at $1 billion or above – more than half were created last year alone.  Though they still only represent a slice of last year’s global total (14%, according to Crunchbase), the high number of births seems

Dry powder now exceeds $500 billion but VC funds are more likely to be cautious and counter-cyclical in the current market… Global start-up funding is slowing but still exceeds pre-pandemic levels, both by deal number and total deal value. Q2 saw the largest quarterly drop in investment in nearly a decade (by 23%), according to data from CB Insights. The $108.5 billion total marked a six-quarter low but was still the sixth largest quarter for investment on record. The scale of the venture boom during 2021 has overshadowed the dot com bubble at the end of the 1990s. After almost a

Historically high levels of venture capital are still being raised by fund managers, but the number of them doing so is starting to fall… Despite the valuation bubble bursting in parts of the venture capital market, the amount of capital raised by funds during the first half of 2022 has continued to boom, driven by record numbers of follow-on funds in the US and funds closing at more than $1 billion.  In July, Bay Area-based Lightspeed Ventures said it raised more than $7 billion across three new US funds, and one focused on India. A few days later, London-based Index