SeedBlink Blog

Can you believe it’s February? 2021 has been an all-time record for all types of investments: traditional (i.e. stocks, mutual funds, bonds, ETFs), newer & less traditional types (i.e. crypto, NFTs, DAOs), and private equity – startups and venture capital.

We are passionate about tech startups investments and excited to see how the opportunities are multiplying, allowing more people, from all domains, to decide to invest for themselves, as per their risk appetite & expertise.

As an example, we have the Italian Golee startup fundraising with Seedorf – the legendary football player - as their advisor (pitch with him here). We are humbled to see talent, ambition, and drive to learn and grow, advocating for startup investments in all industry sectors. Software is eating the world, still holds true many years since the famous essay of Marc Andreessen.

Andrei Dudoiu,

Managing Partner & President of BoD, SeedBlink

Easy access to assets, technology-enabled, education built-in, and communities, are the fundamentals of the new generation investment platforms. And we strive to offer you these. I am grateful to our team, shareholders, entrepreneurs, and platform investors, from whom we draw our desire to serve. Thank you!

PORTFOLIO UPDATES

2021 Investment Portfolio Recap

Take a look at how your investment portfolio has performed over the past year. We asked alumni startups to share with you what went well, where they struggled, and what milestones they are proud of. Hope you like this snapshot!

The 2021 Year in Review – SeedBlink Report

SeedBlink saw record levels of investment in 2021, the year in which we have supported the biggest number of startups. 2021 was the 2nd year of SeedBlink existence and marked our expansion outside Romania. If you’re keen to read an in-depth analysis of the top digital trends in Europe & eager to learn how to adjust your investment strategies to increase growth, download our report.

eBook - A guide with insightful tips & tricks from investors for investors

We have put together an eBook that focuses on the most common challenges and key facts investors need to know when investing in startups and building their portfolios. Several angel investors and partners from leading VC funds have joined the project to share their experiences in this thriving industry. Download here.

Yet another Portfolio Alumnus has closed a new round of funding: Brio! Dive into the January edition of Alumni updates here.

🚀 EUROPEAN TECH NEWS & TRENDS

France is leading the global unicorn race in 2022

With 34 homegrown unicorns, France has now surpassed Sweden and the Netherlands, 24 unicorns each, coming only second to Germany, which has 53. HR tech startup PayFit became France’s and Europe’s first unicorn of 2022, closely followed by Paris-based online marketplace Ankorstore and French fintech Qonto, the latter raising US$552m, marking one of the largest rounds the French tech ecosystem has seen to date. Read more here. 

Top strategic technology trends for 2022

Sustainable tech, Cybersecurity, Data Privacy, Remote Work, augmented reality, improved transparency, and many more are predicted to be key technology trends for this year, by over 40 international experts. The tech that will be very important to the future will begin graduating from R&D labs and enter the marketplace.

The 2021 Romanian Venture Report by How to Web is out

In 2021 the Romanian venture capital market broke the €100M barrier of venture deals for the first time in the post-UiPath era. The volume of capital raised in 2021 by Romanian startups has more than tripled compared to the previous year, going from €30M in 2020 to more than €116M in 2021. And this growth pattern has been trending for the last few years. Read the full report.

🥢 FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Venture Capitalists at Work: How VCs Identify and Build Billion-Dollar Successes

Author Tarang Shah, a venture capital professional himself, interviews rising VC stars, Internet and software investment pioneers, and venture investment thought leaders. You’ll learn firsthand what criteria venture capitalists use to make investments, how they structure deals, the many ways they help the companies they fund, avoidable mistakes they see all too often, the role of luck in success, and why so many startups fail.

Can Big Tech be disrupted?

The tech giants Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, Apple, Google (now Alphabet), Microsoft, and Netflix are all so successful—and generate so much cash—that they seem virtually unstoppable. Yet according to Jonathan Knee, a Columbia Business School professor and veteran investment banker specializing in media and tech, even the digital superpowers face threats. In this interview, he shares an analysis of the weaknesses and strengths of the large tech companies and the strategies they might use to defend themselves.

What Money Can't Buy – The Moral of Markets, by Michael Sandel

In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

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