The past year brought another financing record to the local start-up scene. Austrian start-ups received a total of 1.24 billion euros, about five times as much as in the previous year. Back then, in 2020, investments of 212 million euros also meant a high.
The auditing and consulting company EY presented these figures yesterday, Friday. The significant increase last year is mainly due to two rounds of financing: The crypto trading platform Bitpanda received 367 million euros from investors, the tutoring platform GoStudent 275 million euros.
On the other hand, there was a decrease in the number of financing rounds, from 145 to 130. This makes Austria the only top 15 start-up location in Europe where fewer financing rounds were recorded in 2021 than in 2020, says Florian Haas, head of the Start-up ecosystems at EY. “On the one hand, this is due to the sharp increase in 2020, but on the other hand, it is also due to the fact that larger financing rounds with a focus on scaling were completed in Austria. There is a lot of liquidity on the market.”
Haas still sees a need for improvement, especially political ones: “In many cases, domestic start-ups are successful not because of the general conditions, but despite them.” A more attractive form of company is needed, the possibility of employee participation and a reform of the red-white-red card. Sweden shows how it can work as a smaller country.
Founder metropolis London
Across Europe, the financing volume doubled in the previous year to 88 billion euros. British, German and French start-ups received the most venture capital. Among the major cities, London was ahead of Berlin (10.5), Paris (9.3), Munich (4) and Vienna (1 billion) with 20.3 billion euros. (Rome)
Source: Nachrichten
