Earlier today, I sent out a special edition of my newsletter called “2019 in review”. In brief, it’s an aggregate view of all the funding stories I’ve tracked the past year, and in it I also mention some of the predictions I put forward about a year ago.
I’ll post my predicitons for 2020 in a few days, but first I wanted to review my accuracy for the past year. Here we go:
High profile startups will die: Not true. No big, public failures as far as I have seen. There are probably a few companies that have plateaued (in a “normal trajectory” they should have raised more money this year but haven’t), but that’s it.
Few foreign investments: Somewhat true. According to my data, 31 companies had international investors participating in their fundraise, up from 25 the previous year - a slight increase. Seen as a percentage of all investment rounds, international investors participated in 27.68% of rounds compared to 28.74% in 2018. Looking at the 20 largest funding rounds, 62,5% had participation from an international investor. No massive increase overall, but going in the right direction.
More corporate venture: True. Corporates participated in 34 investment rounds, up from 30 the previous year. An increase yes, but more incremental than the previous year (from 10 to 30 investments).
Still out of sync: True. Not really sure how to prove this, but the absence of evidence of the contrary is probably sufficcent. I could probably point at the stock price of Kahoot as an example of continued optimism for Norwegian tech companies.
More climate change investments: True. In 2018, 100MNOK was invested in 2 companies working on climate crisis related problems. In 2019, we saw 11 companies receive more than 600MNOK in funding.
Norway as an attractive market: False. Amazon did not launch in Norway in 2019, and Revolut appears to be struggling.
No new option rules: True. No significant changes to option rules. This was an easy way to score points though.
Adding this up, I give myself 4.5 out of 7 possible points. Not too bad - especially as I work in an industry where you can win by being right 10% of the time.