European tech startups and scaleups to watch in 2021

Don't be fooled by Klarna's candy-pink branding, buzzy slogans and glitzy advertising. The fintech recently secured a $10.65bn valuation and is eyeing a public listing in the next couple of years.

Klarna offers “buy now pay later” loans at selected retailers, giving consumers instant credit at checkout, which they then pay back over in installments. It now operates across most of Europe, as well as Australia and the US.

Founded in 2005 in Sweden, the company makes most of its money from retailers, who give Klarna a chunk of the transaction price each time. Consumer late fees and interest make up an undisclosed part of its revenue, but the company was profitable for 10 years up until 2019.

Nonetheless, Klarna has come under fire in recent years for failing to flag the dangers of debt to consumers, with pressure groups lobbying for clearer advertising standards.

Read more: Pablo Escobar’s brother is suing Klarna for millions

Is Klarna worth $11bn?

When green energy startup Northvolt raised $1bn in 2019, it came as quite a surprise.

Based in northern Sweden and founded by a former Tesla employee, Northvolt is building a lithium-ion battery cell factory to supply the world's growing fleet of electric cars — and, perhaps, other forms of transport too.

It hit the headlines again in 2020, when Spotify founder Daniel Ek announced that he was participating in a new $600m funding round into Northvolt; the first investment from his €1bn 'moonshot' fund.

Read more: This Swedish startup just raised $1bn to build a battery farm to rival Tesla’s “gigafactory”

Spotify founder backs gigafactory as first deeptech investment

Designing and developing software robots to automate repetitive business tasks, UiPath has experienced explosive growth over the last few years.

Its valuation has jumped 6000% in the last few years to $7bn as investors bet it will become a global champion. The wider RPA sector is growing over 60% a year, positioning market leader UiPath well to benefit from the trend.

Of course, companies are waking up to the fact that RPA is not just a magic bullet that can fix all their problems (indeed, it can create a fair few), but it’s still powerful if used correctly.

The big question for cofounder Daniel Dines is if it’s going to be a big global RPA company or the big global RPA company. Rivals include companies such as Blue Prism in the UK and Automation Anywhere in the US.

The other big question is when they list on the stock market and where.

Read more: The Romanian unicorn automating your job

Berlin-based Auto1 is a pan-European online marketplace for used cars. It values and buys used cars from individuals, dealerships, and manufacturers — then sells them for a profit to dealerships.

Used cars are a huge market, with around 39m cars sold every year in Europe (compared to 17m new). Within the market, Auto1 it’s a giant. The company has taken in €460m from Japanese conglomerate Softbank and since launching in 2012 has expanded into more than 30 countries. It says it is now trading with more than 35,000 professional partners and selling more than 40,000 cars per month.

But watch out, because there are rivals. Cazoo, the brainchild of Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman, has raised €60m pre-launch to sell second-hand cars direct to consumers later in 2019. It’s a slightly different model, as it’s selling to consumers not dealers, but still a potential threat as market dynamics in this space evolve swiftly.

Now the company is headed for a massive European IPO.

Revolut almost needs no introduction, as one of the fastest-growing online banking platforms in Europe.

Having begun as a travel currency-exchange card, the company has since expanded aggressively into a full range of services, including cryptocurrency and stockbroking services. Led by Nikolay Storonsky, the company reports having 11m customers, and is adding around 11,000 accounts a day.

According to an analysis by Sifted last year, Revolut leads its peers Monzo, N26 and Starling in terms of downloads, deposits and revenues — even when adjusted for time.

Its 2020 fundraise also valued the company at $5.5bn, and Revolut now has ambitions of gaining a UK bank licence and conquering the US and Asia.

However, amid fast growth, Revolut has also been stung by complaints of a toxic corporate culture, while The Telegraph claimed the company turned off a system designed to prevent money laundering for three months in 2018 (Revolut denies both).

Read more: Digital banks Monzo, Revolut, Starling and N26 compared

Revolut staff vent frustration over share options

Europe is beating the US in fintech innovation, says Revolut’s Nikolay Storonsky

OakNorth is largely comprised of a bog standard bank, which has had a meteoric rise granting loans to small businesses.

OakNorth Bank has a large loan book, with around £3bn in outstanding loans at the last count, and just two defaults. The bank made £66m in profit last year, making it one of the most profitable financial newcomers in Europe.

Still, OakNorth’s $2.8bn valuation largely rests in its “credit science” arm. The company white labels its credit-analysis technology (dubbed Acorn) to non-UK banks, with a handful of clients now signed up.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund led a high-profile funding round into the fintech in 2019.

Read more: Seven OakNorth power-players pulling the strings behind the scenes

Oxford University spin-out Oxford Nanopore develops and sells devices which analyse DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules. That's useful not just in medicine, but also agriculture and science more broadly.

In May 2020, it won a $56m contract to help the UK government roll out a novel coronavirus test.

N26 was the first mobile banking platform of its kind, launching in Germany in 2013.

Led by founder Valentin Stalf, the company now has over 3.5m subscribers in Europe and has now joined rivals such as Revolut in making a play for the US market.

N26 has raised close to $800m to date and is backed by the likes of Peter Thiel and serial fintech investor Ian Osborne.

It’s been less than plain sailing for N26 though. The company was forced to pull out of the UK after a year, citing Brexit as a key factor. It has also faced a string of high-profile departures as well as staff unrest.

Nonetheless, N26’s investors are bullish that Covid-19 has increased demand for digital banking, putting the startup in a good position to lead the new era of consumer finance.

Read more: N26 facing staff unrest in Berlin, as employees say confidence in management at “all time low”

N26 hits a $3.5bn valuation — but can it break into the US?

Simulation software startup Improbable has always had an aura of mystery about it — partly because it operated in stealth for a long time, gained a billion-dollar valuation not long after launching and has landed numerous deals with the military.

Founder Herman Narula has sold investors including SoftBank and Andreessen Horowitz on his vision to "build the Matrix". The big question is whether he can actually pull it off.

Online used car retailer Cazoo is proof of the power of the serial entrepreneur.

Founder Alex Chesterman, whose previous businesses include property platform Zoopla and media company LoveFilm, has raised several huge rounds of funding in just a few short years.

Many of Cazoo's investors have worked with him before — and they clearly want more. His goal is an ambitious one: he wants to shake up the £50bn second-hand-car market in the UK.

Read more: Cazoo becomes fastest-ever British unicorn Cazoo goes full speed ahead

FlixBus's bright green buses are now running services in over 30 countries — including the US.

In 2019, the company carried 62m passengers but 2020 has, for obvious reasons, been more difficult, with FlixBus having to pause some services in response to national lockdowns.

Read more: German transport unicorn FlixMobility wants to move the world

Atom Bank is another UK challenger lender making a play for the millennial market with mobile-first savings accounts.

Like its larger peers Starling, Monzo and N26 it is facing a difficult environment, particularly as competition heats up in the mortgage business.

Led by Mark Mullen and 40% owned by Spanish bank BBVA, it is rumoured to be aiming for an IPO in 2022.

Just as Nordic fintech Klarna is backed by Calvin Broadus (better known as Snoop Dogg, or Smoooth Dogg), the American rapper, Atom bank is backed by US musician will.i.am, the lead singer in the Black Eyed Peas.

Will.i.am is a strategic advisor and, apparently, provides “an external perspective on culture, philanthropy and technology”.

Related: Starling, Revolut and Monzo’s annual results compared

On-demand delivery platform Glovo will deliver just about anything — food, pills, flowers — to its customers' doors. The big question now is whether it can also deliver profit and growth to its investors.

To achieve that, Glovo is pushing hard into the fast-growing segment of grocery delivery and continues to pull out of markets where competition is too tough. (In September 2020, it sold its Latin American operations to competitor Delivery Hero “to focus on key markets where we can build a long-term sustainable business".)

It will need to battle not just the competition, but also the courts: like many food delivery companies, Glovo relies on freelance 'gig economy' workers to fulfil its speedy deliveries — but regulators are pushing for them to be treated like employees. That would throw a real spanner in the works.

On-demand delivery startup Glovo raises €150m and becomes Spain’s second unicorn

Glovo goes big on grocery

Glovo: The everything app

Starling is the youngest of the consumer-focused digital challenger banks. Although founded in 2014, it launched in 2017, after Revolut in 2015 and Monzo in 2016. It’s also smaller than both in terms of the number of users.

But in a fiercely competitive sector (Monzo’s Tom Blomfield worked at Starling before staging a walkout of top executives and forming the rival bank) Starling is on track to be the first to actually make a profit.

This is due to success outside just retail banking in the ream of business accounts and offering banking-as-a-service products to other financial institutions. There are also rumours of a planned IPO in 2022.

The company is 20% owned by staff with the rest owned by two main backers — Austrian-born investor Harry McPike and Merian Global Investors.

Related: Starling, Revolut and Monzo’s annual results compared

Inside Anne Boden’s Starling

Smart chip company Graphcore started making the kind of intelligence processing units that AI companies would need before being an AI company was really a thing. Now, of course, every other startup likes to see themselves that way.

That makes Bristol-based Graphcore hot property. It has now shipped tens of thousands of its microchips, landed deals with Microsoft and Dell and attracted top investors like Atomico and Sequoia.

Read more: Graphcore takes aim at Nvidia with new AI chip

It would be hard to jumble more jargon into one company's Google ad word listing than Snyk's: 'Dev First Security - Securing Cloud Native Apps'.

In plain speak, London-based Snyk helps developers find vulnerabilities in their code and keep businesses secure.

ApisProtect may not be the biggest Irish startups, but it’s in an exciting field (much beloved by Sifted) of bee-tech. Founded in 2017, ApisProtect develops internet-connected beehive sensors and has raised more money than any bee-tech business in the world.

It’s hive sensors monitor temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, sound and movement; data which can be analysed by machine learning to provide alerts for issues like disease, pests or unusual behaviour.

“Our machine learning turns data into useful information,” Fiona Murphy told Sifted last year. “We can show beekeepers which colonies are alive or dead, which are performing well or not, so they can decide if they need to feed them, apply insecticide or slap some extra insulation on the hives.”

ApisProtect has been training its AI with 20 beekeeper partners, 200 sensor units and 10m honey bees monitored across the US, Ireland, the UK and South Africa. “We don’t want to train an algorithm on Irish beehives and expect that to land in California and work,” says Murphy.

The startup has some rivals in the form of BeeHero (Israel), Pollenity (Bulgaria) and Arnia (Italy) and so this is a hot field which ApisProtect hopes to dominate.

At the start of 2020, travel app Omio was ready to take on the US, as well as helping people across Europe book train, bus and plane journeys.

Then Covid came along, and US expansion got somewhat put on hold.

Read more: Omio raises $100m in Europe’s biggest travel round of 2020