Europe’s first open-sourced, self-paced acceleration program for founders raising Venture Capital

Europe now has one go-to resource and community for founders raising their first rounds of capital – a need which has never been more pertinent as the number of pre-seed deals has declined from 5,300 in 2016 to 3,500 in 2019. In other words, we’re losing 1,800 pre-seed deals every year in Europe.

Acceleration program for founders raising Venture Capital

One of the biggest reasons for this is the lack of knowledge and guidance available to founders raising capital in Europe; while the market is awash with incubators and advisors who know how to build a startup, only very few know how to run a professional fundraise. If we want to catch up to the American startup ecosystem, we need to diffuse this knowledge as fast as possible.

Today is a good day for founders raising their first rounds of capital in Europe. The newly launched self-paced acceleration program provides free access for any founder anywhere in Europe to a highly structured, simple to implement 10 step fundraise acceleration process and community, fully equipped with a corps of highly connected expert mentors, weekly webinars & Q&As with venture capitalists and a 20-hour-crash-course on how venture capitalists think, make decisions and what it means to founders.

The program and community is led by the hosts of The European VC podcast drawing on the knowledge and network connected to Europe’s only podcast dedicated to the venture capital industry.

Andreas Munk Holm, co-founder & co-host at The European VC: “We’ve built this because we’ve seen too many founders struggle to raise – and actually trip their own feet because they don’t know the rules – the very weird rules – that a fundraise must be run by. My best example is that while you in a B2B sales process WANT a warm intro, in fundraising, it’s practically required.

Only 6% of the cold inbound deals that come to a VC actually ends up becoming an investment. So that is ONE of the core rules that you need to know, but there are so many more. And when you know them, you need to know how to adapt your fundraise accordingly. That’s what we hope to help founders with in our self-paced program and community.”

David Cruz e Silva, co-founder & co-host at The European VC: “The process is centred around a virtual community for founders to share and collaborate throughout their process. The European ecosystem being so highly dispersed, all too many founders are raising almost on their own. That’s a key difference between Silicon Valley – and also the big tech hubs in Europe – and the rest. Genius is global, so the next ground-breaking idea and founding team can come from anywhere, but we need to be better at giving genius access to the knowledge and network necessary to go from idea to business. And we don’t do that well enough in Europe, yet.”

Invest in Europe & the EIF report “The VC Factor” (2021) page 3: “It turns out that VC firms tend to cluster together much more than their investees. More than 50% of all VC firms operate in very large cities in comparison to 34% of all start-ups. As a result, a few important hubs capture a significant share of the VC activity in Europe concerns were raised that this might be reducing opportunities for entrepreneurs away from the larger VC hotspots.

The “communication” among VC hotspots is particularly relevant for policy, because it relates to the interconnectedness of the European VC ecosystem. In fact, a more interconnected VC ecosystem might provide one effective solution against the side effects of the rising geographical concentration of start-ups.”

The European VC podcast is Europe’s only fully dedicated podcast to fostering a more interconnected VC ecosystem and has done this by highlighting European VC Champions and connecting founders and investors across borders. The self-paced fundraise acceleration program & community is a direct extension of this ambition in that it not only educates and brings together founders but also connects them to mentors and VCs across the continent.

More information can be found here.