Hello,
Happy New Year and welcome back to the Houghton Street Ventures Community newsletter, our monthly update on what’s happening within the LSE startup and venture ecosystem. Today, we’re taking a look back at the data for 2023. But first, here’s an event to kick off the new year:
New York - Entrepreneurial Horizons: Reflect, Revise, Redefine - 24th January - for LSE alumni founders, aspiring entrepreneurs, operators and investors to connect - book your ticket here
If you’re interested in learning more about Houghton Street Ventures, we’d love to hear from you. Or if you have ideas about future content or collaborations, just hit reply!
2023 in Review: Adapting to a ‘New’ Investment Era
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
— George Bernard Shaw
Having started the Houghton Street Ventures blog with our first post looking back at the LSE entrepreneurial ecosystem data for 2021, I can’t help but feel we led with so many records being broken; it has been hard to match that given the very well-documented change in the venture capital landscape since then.
So…
I wanted to start with something familiar — more records!
We have never tracked as many LSE alumni founders as we do today. We are monitoring 27,000 individuals who have graduated from the LSE and either previously ran or still run an entrepreneurial venture — that is more than 10% of the total alumni base (and up from under 25,000 this time last year). If you look at those still actively involved, we count over 17,000, up from less than 16,000 a year ago. Part of it is that we continue to find a handful of historic LSE founders (due to our efforts on the data side of things), but the vast majority is the inclusion of over 1,000 additional companies started by LSE alumni in 2023.
2023 has officially marked a return to the true meaning of the word ‘unicorn’. They are indeed a rare beast; so rare that CB Insights only counts 69 newly minted in 2023 (down from 511 in 2021). The good news is that LSE alumni founded two of them.
Synthesia raised their Series C, and have fast become the biggest AI video platform in the world and MNT-Halan became our first LSE African unicorn; they are fast becoming one of Egypt’s largest banks and lenders to the un- and underbanked.
As of today, with the data we currently have, there have never been more LSE-founded unicorns in the wild at one time — we currently count 26.
However, from a data point of view, the bad news lies not in the absolutes but in the relatives. Depending on whether you look at total dollars raised as equity in venture capital or the number of rounds undertaken, we are back to levels not seen since either 2019 or 2014, respectively.
Total equity capital raised by LSE entrepreneurs (in USD)
Number of investment rounds announced by LSE entrepreneurs
To provide a bit of a benchmark, this puts the LSE ecosystem (in terms of USD raised) at more than 3x that of the Spanish venture capital ecosystem, around half of the Swedish and around a third of the French, according to Dealroom ecosystem data. Not bad for an ecosystem with a “population” in line with that of Barbados.
Ecosystem Offerings
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Community News & Updates
LSE Generate
LSE Generate have a packed agenda of events to kickstart the year from ‘Female Founder Mastermind’ workshops to ‘Cold Outreach Essentials’ sessions, check out the full calendar here
Applications are open for the LSE Startup Competition! Sign up here to apply for the chance to win a share of the £20,000 prize fund plus bespoke business coaching.
Big Deals
Kerno - founded by Sean Madigan - raised a $1.7m Seed led by Elkstone Partners
Cargon - founded by Vano Chaladze - raised a $1.7m Seed led by Sturgeon Capital
Arbonics - founded by Lisett Luik - raised a €5.5m Seed led by Plural Platform
Blusmart Mobility - founded by Punit Goyal - raised a $24m Series A led by BP Ventures
Biryani by Kilo - founded by Vishal Jindal - raised a $8.6m Series C by Alpha Wave Ventures
Scalable Capital - founded by Adam French - raised a €60m Series E from Balderton Capital
In the News
Scalable’s Series E picked up a lot of press, featuring in TechCrunch after their €60m investment from Balderton Capital
HelloFresh were in the news announcing their latest partnership with multi-hyphenate, Keke Palmer
Roga announced the launch of their first wearable product for mental health in India
Truelayer featured as they became the first to participate in the SEPA payment account access scheme
The founders of Habitto were interviewed by AsiaTechDaily on how they managed to crack the Japanese fintech market without knowing a word of Japanese
Meet the Team
If our paths cross or if you’re swinging by London, come visit us in the LSE library - we’d love to catch up, let us know!
New York - 23rd - 26th January - Hannah will be in town, with the LSE Generate team, for an ‘LSE Female Founders Breakfast’ (shout if you’d like to find out more), as well as meetings with founders/ investors.
Berlin - 19th - 23rd March - Hannah is in Berlin delivering ESG training and meeting founders/LPs
Best,
Hannah, Adam, and David