Brooke Kiley
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Insight has a long and successful history investing in Europe, and we are more excited than ever by the opportunities we see emerging out of that ecosystem.
Many of our fastest growing deals, like pipedrive, Darktrace, and N26, are companies coming out of Europe. We particularly like investing in Europe because the companies tend to be much more product focused. There is great technical talent coming out of top institutions throughout Europe, and we’re seeing a noticeable increase in talent as many graduates are looking to pursue careers in tech after seeing local success stories like Spotify and Supercell. Another benefit is that capital can go much farther in Europe, with your technical talent being as great as 50% less then in Silicon Valley.
Accompanying this strong early emphasis on product, we often see an under optimized sales teams. In our roll as growth equity investors we see this as a positive signal since it means they’ve achieved product market fit and it’s also an area where we can help and unlock a massive wave of growth.
What’s interesting is that we’re also seeing a lot of great companies emerge outside of the major tech hubs. We believe that b2b software companies can be built anywhere and that these markets are certainly underfunded right now. This will be an area that we continue to focus on and look for deal flow. A good example of this is a recent investment of ours called LeanIX. They are based in Bonn Germany and seeing tremendous success.
The statistics are already starting to show a massive uptick in in the success of European start ups, but I think this is just the beginning.
