Y Combinator’s Spring-Summer 2021 accelerator turned out to be the largest gathering of EU tech startups. Due to the pandemic, the Y Combinator accelerator program went online last year. So, when the apprehension was a low footfall, it turned out bigger than before. A total of 73 EU tech startups comprised 17% of the total cohort setting the highest record in the history of a 15-year-long Y Combinator accelerator program.
The Head of Admissions at Y Combinator, Stephanie Simon, remarks, “There’s clearly a lot of talent in Europe and we’re excited to support more European founders. Applications from the European founders have been steadily increasing every batch, with significant growth since YC has gone remote (we’ve been remote since Summer 2020).” In fact, in 2021, EU tech startups raised a whopping $57.5B, which is three times more than registered in 2020.
EU eCommerce Startups
1. Copenhagen, Northern Europe-based GamerPay is a platform to buy, sell, and trade video game skins and assets without the fear of being scammed. On February 1, 2021, the company raised a Seed fund of an undisclosed amount from PSV PreSeed Ventures. Other investors include Rainmaking, Vækstfonden, with the latest being Y Combinator. According to the founders, Rasmus Andersen, Morten Byskov, Peter Haldbæk, and Mathias Hermansen, “GamerPay is the first regulated marketplace, who also let minors trade when providing their parents’ digital consent, giving them peace of mind.”
2. Zürich, Switzerland-based Pabio helps homeowners avail themselves of custom interior design packages at an equated monthly installment with eventual ownership. Founded in 2020, the company raised a pre-Seed fund of $1M led by Session.vc, Christian Weniger, Jeremias Meier, Swiss Startup Group, and the most recent being Y Combinator 2021. According to the founders Carlo Badini and Anand Chowdhary, “With our asset-light rent-to-own business model, qualified customers can get $20k of new furniture with $0 upfront and monthly payments for up to 4 years.”
EU Fintech Startups
3. Barcelona, Spain-based Payflow helps employees get paid their salary on-demand, whenever they want. Founded in 2020, the company raised a total of $5.4M in funding over four rounds from 11 investors. As a part of the Y Combinator 2021 batch, the Spanish payment technology company has raised an additional investment of an undisclosed amount. According to the founders Benoit Menardo and Avinash Sukhwani, “Payflow is sold to the employers as an employee benefit whenever they want, instead of just once a month (or biweekly).”
4. Paris, France-based Numary is an open-source financial ledger, which helps users record all transactions in one place and reconcile complex money flows. Founded in 2021, there is no publicly available funding information. However, the company has raised an undisclosed fund as a part of the Y Combinator 2021 cohort. According to the founder Clément Salaün, “With its integrated language Numscript, developers can building complex money flows while saving engineering time & reducing risk.”
EU Developer Technology Startups
5. Berlin, Germany-based Moving Parts is a components library for iOS designers and engineers. Founded in 2021, there is no publicly available funding information. However, the company has raised an undisclosed fund as a part of the Y Combinator 2021 cohort. According to the founders Robb Böhnke and Michael Nino Evensen, “Moving parts components are highly styleable and responsive with localization, accessibility, and follow-all platform best practices around dark mode, dynamic font size etc.”
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6. A Coruña, Spain-based Arengu is a low-code platform to sign up easily and onboard users. Founded in 2018, the company raised total funding of $545.9K in funding over two rounds. On February 11, 2020, the company raised a Seed fund of $586K led by Rafael Garrido, Viko Group, Lanai Partners, and K Fund. Earlier, the company raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Viko Group. As a part of the Y Combinator 2021, the startup has raised another seed of an undisclosed amount. According to the founders Pablo Castro Valiño, Sergio Regueira, and Jacobo Vidal, “Arengu low-code startup makes it easy to build the UI, add custom logic, integrations with 3rd parties and get insights of user behaviour.”
7. Kraków, Poland-based Enso is a no-code interactive ETL and data analysis tool. Founded in 2018, Founded in 2021, there is no publicly available funding information. However, the company has raised an undisclosed fund as a part of the Y Combinator 2021 cohort. According to the founders Sylwia Brodacka and Wojciech Danilo, “Enso helps users load, blend, analyze your data, and then automate the whole process, simply by connecting visual components together. “
8. Bucharest, Romania-based Archbee is a knowledge documentation tool. Founded in January 2018, on July 19, 2021, the company raised a Seed fund of $1M led by Inovo Venture Partners and Y Combinator. According to the founder Dragos Bulugean, “Archbee helps build product documentation sites, internal wikis, knowledge bases, API references, developer guides, architecture diagrams, and more.”
EU NoCode B2B SaaS Startups
9. Nice, France-based Beau is a no-code tool for businesses to onboard and automate interactions with their clients. Founded in 2021, the company has no raised a pre-Seed fund of $125K as a part of the Y Combinator 2021 cohort. According to the founders Mila Dayan, Kyril Kulikov, and Anand Chowdhary, “Customers use our software to collect submissions, payments, send messages and more. “
10. Paris, France-based Whaly helps build analytics and reports on top of their everyday tools such as Hubspot, Postgres, Airtable, Google Ads, etc., without coding. Founded in 2021, there is no available investment disclosure so far, but the founders, Florian Buguet, Emilien Sanchez, and Pierre de Poulpiquet are now a part of the Y Combinator 21 accelerator program suggesting a good financial takeoff hereafter. The team said, “people were unable to execute their data projects because tools were too fragmented and made for engineers. We decided to make a bundled, no code platform for these.”
11. Heidelberg, Germany-based Snowboard Software is a no-code data catalog solutions provider helping businesses harness unstructured big data for informed business decisions. Founded in 2021, the company has raised a pre-Seed fund of approximately $125K as a part of the Y Combinator 2021 cohort. According to the founders Rick Radewagen, Sven Rudolph, and Theo Tortorici, “Our laser-focus on Snowflake enables us to extract metadata and usage data that is not available to existing data catalog solutions.”
Swiss BioTech R&D Startup
12. Lausanne, Switzerland-based Adaptyv Biosystems is a protein engineering platform impacting biotechnology research and development. Founded in 2020, the company has raised a total of $279.4K in three funding rounds from two investors, including FAST by GettyLab and Y Combinator 2021. On August 4, 2021, the Swiss biotechnology startup also received a grant of $153.35K. According to the founders Julian Englert, Moustafa Houmani, Daniel Nakhaee-Zadeh Gutierrez, and Amir Shahein, “Adaptyv Biosystems closes the loop between computational prediction and experimental validation with cell-free synthetic biology and high-throughput nanofluidics.”
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