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The worst days look to be behind us. European startups raised €47.3bn in equity, debt and grant funding across 2,971 rounds from January to June this year, tracked by Sifted’s data team. Dilutive financing is slightly down compared to the second half of 2023, but higher than the same period last year.
€18.7bn of that funding was debt. At the current pace, that figure will surpass 2022’s debt funding record of €28.1bn in Europe.
Climate tech has a big role to play, with Northvolt and green steel producer H2 Green Steel raising huge debt rounds in January; $5bn and €4.2bn respectively.
But fintechs have raised the highest share of debt rounds, as a percentage of total funding rounds. The biggest debt round was raised by point-of-sale giant SumUp (€1.5bn, led by Goldman Sachs), followed by £750m for payments platform Tabeo.
The most active lenders include two of Europe’s biggest LPs — the European Investment Bank and Bpifrance — as well as many of the region’s biggest high street banks, including BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank. HSBC Innovation Banking (formerly SVB UK) took the top spot.
Debt aside, there were also 63 equity megarounds — of $100m+ — the highest figure since the first half of 2022.
Europe minted eight new $1bn companies in H1 — more than the whole of 2023. It included several AI upstarts, such as AI voice generator ElevenLabs and autonomous vehicle company Wayve — and three companies working on the CFO tech stack; DataSnipper, Pennylane and Pigment.
Meanwhile, at the early stage, funding has been ticking up across the year, rising from €1.3bn in January to €1.8bn in June.
And VCs are — although it might not always feel like it — landing capital too. Over €15bn of fresh capital has been raised by Europe's VCs so far this year — the most since H1 2022.
Dig into 20+ charts and a whole heap of data in our free-to-download report.
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Update, August 1: The chart of funding rounds by month and list of most-active venture debt funders were updated.
