In the first quarter of 2013, according to a report by Clipperton finance, the ranking of the most active funds by number of deals was led by High-Tech Gründerfonds, Index Ventures (USA) and Intel Capital.
With 11 investments in Q1, HTGF leads European funding activity. HTGF is a public-private partnership, including 14 industrial groups such as Daimler, Deutsche Post, Deutsche Telekom, etc. With € 560 million under management, the fund focuses mainly on seed investments. Its investment area covers the entire field of innovation financing: 6 companies in IT, 3 in Cleantech and 2 in Biotech have been co-financed.
«Several public-private collaboration initiatives are emerging that demonstrate their impact on the innovation financing sector. In Spain we also have several good examples, such as ENISA's agreements with the main players in Spanish VC and the Isabel La Catolica Fund of co-investment with business angels. It would be interesting for a fund like the German one, which collaborates with large corporations, to appear», comments Diego Gutiérrez (CEO ABRA IVNEST), a company specialising in alternative financing for SMEs.
Index Ventures, the US venture capital firm based in Geneva and London, has been a very active player in the European market, with 5 investments. Most notably, they participated in a 130 million dollar deal in Supercell and 24 million dollars in Elasticsearch – an open-source search and analytics engine. It also co-led a funding round for the fashion business, specifically a news website dedicated to analysing and reporting on the fashion business.
Intel Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of technology giant Intel, participated in three major rounds. Twenty-one million US dollars has been invested in Tobii, a hardware and software solutions provider for eye tracking. The other two investments include AltoBridge, a wireless networking solutions provider, for $ 7.8 million, and Nexmo, an API provider for push SMS, for $ 3 million.
«Intel has also had a presence in significant operations in Spain, participating in the Spanish firm Intelligent Dialogue Systems (Indisys) with a funding agreement worth 5 million dollars (3.87 million euros) and with the participation of the Spanish investment group Inveready SCR, according to Diego Gutiérrez.
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