Google Ventures (GV), which is tech giant Alphabet’s venture arm, is making investments worldwide, especially in North America, Europe, the UK, and Israel. It’s a strong signal of commitment at a time when some members of Europe’s startup ecosystem are worried that the tech slowdown will cause non-European investors to pull back from the continent.
Currently, GV has more than $10 billion in assets under management, 650 all-time investments, and over 400 active portfolio companies, including Uber, Nest, Slack, and GitLab, since its debut over a decade back.
Until recently, a majority of GV’s European investments were in the UK, including smartphone maker Nothing and edtech unicorn Multiverse. Notably, GV, which was initially branded Google Ventures was not a strategic fund. It first opened its office in London years back and was one of the first Silicon Valley investors to make this move to directly plunge into the European ecosystem.
However, in recent times, it has invested in several European companies showing its commitment to other regions. To mention a few, GV’s portfolio includes popular European companies such as GoCardless, Nothing, Snyk, Vaccitech, Lemonade, and CurrencyCloud.
GV managing partner & head of Europe, Tom Hulme, stated: “Since opening the doors to our London office a decade ago, we have believed that some of this generation’s most impactful, high-growth technology companies will get their start in the EU — we believe this more strongly today than ever,” said Tom Hulme, Managing Partner & Head of Europe. “We’ve invested over half a billion dollars into European startups and expanded our geographical remit in recent years, making new investments in Denmark, Germany, Spain, and The Netherlands. We’re privileged to partner with so many exceptional founders, and our team in London continues to be incredibly active in the ecosystem.”
That said, here are the recent investments from GV in Europe and the UK.
Again (Denmark)
Founder/s: Torbjørn Jensen, Alex Nielsen, Max Kufner
Founded year: 2020
The Danish climate tech startup turns carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals. It uses bioproduction processes, which take waste CO2 and feed the gas straight into its bioreactors, where it is fermented with hydrogen, akin to the process of brewing beer. This results in emission-free and commercial-grade chemicals which are sold to its customers at a market-competitive price.
This technology is already working at Again’s first carbon utilisation facility in Denmark, which is converting CO2 into acetate, the base chemical for adhesives, solvents, plastics, textiles, and cosmetics, and reducing emissions by up to 80%.
Earlier this month, Again raised $43 million in Series A funding co-led by GV and HV Capital alongside investments from Kompas VC, EIFO – Denmark’s Export and Investment Fund, ACME Capital, and Atlantic Labs.
Climate X (UK)
Founder/s: Lukky Ahmed, Kamil Kluza
Founded year: 2020
London-based climate risk intelligence startup Climate X helps financial institutions and real estate become more resilient to the impacts of climate change. It has created a digital “twin” of the Earth, called Spectra, that projects the probability of extreme weather events, and how they can affect properties, infrastructure, and assets.
The platform allows clients to model the future likelihood of 16 different climate hazards from extreme heat to tropical cyclones and flooding across eight warming scenarios over a 100-year time horizon. Translating these risks into expected annual losses, the platform allows clients to determine the ROI of taking pre-emptive climate adaptation action based on a range of 22 different interventions.
Last month, Climate X raised $18 million in Series A funding. GV led the round alongside support from Pale Blue Dot, CommerzVentures, A/O, Blue Wire Capital, PT1, Unconventional Ventures, and Western Technology Investment (WTI).
Lawhive (UK)
Founder/s: Pierre Proner, Jaime van Oers, Flinn Dolman
Founded year: 2021
London-based legal-tech startup Lawhive, dubbed the ‘Shopify-for-law’ operates an AI-powered platform for lawyers. Legal professionals can work with their clients or be matched with consumers and small businesses through the Lawhive marketplace. Using AI to handle several aspects of legal work, the platform enables huge time-savings for lawyers and major cost and efficiency benefits for their clients. As a result, the company can tackle a vast array of common legal matters that up until now have been the domain of traditional high-street law firms.
At the centre of the Lawhive platform is an AI lawyer, Lawrence, built on top of Lawhive’s own fine-tuned LLM which has demonstrated better results than any other LLM at carrying out legal work.
A few months back, Lawhive raised £9.5 million in seed funding led by GV, with participation from Episode 1 Ventures to expand its team.
CUR8 (UK)
Founder/s: Marta Krupinska, Gabrielle Walker, Mark Stevenson
Founded year: 2022
London-based climate tech startup CUR8 offering a market-making platform for carbon removals is addressing the challenge of decarbonisation by professionalising and accelerating the carbon removals industry. It recognises that companies face obstacles in investing in carbon removal portfolios due to issues such as supply limitations, concerns about quality and risk, and high prices.
Earlier this year, CUR8 closed £5.3 million in a pre-seed funding round. It will use the investment to invest in growing its team, further product development, and scale up its platform’s capacity to serve more customers and suppliers.
Lapse (UK)
Founder/s: Ben Silvertown, Dan Silvertown
Founded year: 2021
Lapse is a photo-sharing app created for friends. The disposable-camera-inspired interface allows users to capture and share authentic, unedited photos with friends, keeping people in the moment and providing an alternative to the traditional game of likes and followers that rules social media.
Earlier this year, the friends-focused photo-sharing app, raised $30M in Series A funding. The round was led by Greylock, DST Global Partners, with participation from existing investors GV, Octopus Ventures, and Speedinvest, alongside angel investors.
Polar Signals (Germany)
Founder/s: Frederic Branczyk
Founded year: 2020
Berlin-based Polar Signals is on a mission to transform the understanding and optimisation of high-performance systems. It focuses on continuous profiling, a process that involves gathering application performance data in real-time and providing it to developers for thorough analysis. By capturing detailed profiles of running programs, Polar Signals’ platform allows engineers to understand resource usage in function and line number.
The company’s flagship open-source product, Parca, has a simple deployment, no dependencies, and deep integration with Kubernetes. Also, the company allows developers to pinpoint exactly what parts of their code contribute to resource usage.
In March this year, Polar Signals raised an additional $6.8 million in funding led by Spark Capital, bringing the total fund raised to $10.8 million.
Scandit (Switzerland)
Founder/s: Christian Floerkemeier, Christof Roduner, Samuel Mueller
Founded year: 2009
Scandit provides smart data capture software. Their technology allows any smart device equipped with a camera to scan barcodes, IDs, and text and to perform additional functions using augmented reality and advanced analytics.
It provides computer vision-based smart data capture technology that enables barcode scanning, text, and object recognition for enterprise workflows. Its smart data capture SDKs are deployed in a range of industries such as retail, transport, logistics, and manufacturing for use cases including inventory management, order fulfilment, store operations, mobile self-scanning, asset tracking, and field operations.
In 2022, the company closed its Series D funding round of $150 million, which has valued it at $1 billion, thereby becoming a unicorn. The oversubscribed funding round also saw the participation from existing shareholders, including Forestay Capital, Atomico, GV, G2VP, Kreos, Schneider Electric, Swisscom Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund by IGV, and NGP Capital.
deepset.ai (Germany)
Founder/s: Milos Rusic, Malte Pietsch
Founded year: 2018
Germany-based deepset.ai provides an LLM platform deepset Cloud, a model-agnostic developer platform for AI teams looking to build customised, flexible systems powered by the latest language models. A SOC 2-certified platform that lets its users retain full ownership of their data, deepset Cloud allows organisations to unlock the value of LLMs, get to market faster, and gain a competitive advantage.
The platform allows different product team stakeholders to work in a unified environment with fast prototyping, frequent feedback cycles, and easy customisation.
Late last year, the company raised $30 million led by Balderton Capital, with participation from GV and Harpoon Ventures, System.One, and Lunar.
Context.ai (UK)
Founder/s: Henry Scott-Green, Alex Gamble
Founded year: 2023
The product analytics platform for LLM-powered applications, Context.ai is designed to help businesses understand user behaviour and measure product performance so they can build AI products. Through its platform, businesses can track frequently discussed conversation topics, identify where their product is performing well versus poorly, debug bad conversations, monitor brand risks, understand user retention, and measure the impact of new releases.
Last year, Context.ai snapped $3.5 million from GV and Tomasz Tunguz at Theory Ventures, with participation from participation from 20SALES, and a slew of angel investors.
