Invest Europe published its annual report on investment and fundraising for the European private equity and venture capital industry. The report covers activity on over 1,250 firms, directly verified by fund managers using the European Data Cooperative (EDC). The EDC holds data from over 3,000 European private equity firms on 8,000 funds, 64,000 portfolio companies and 250,000 transactions since … Read more
On the 15th of January 2018, the Austrian law on Economic Ownership Register (wirtschaftliche Eigentümer Registergesetz – WiEReG) enters into force. The purpose of this register is to make ultimate beneficial owners transparent and verifiable and preventing money laundering and terrorist financing. The European Union ascertained a need to identify any natural person who exercises control over a … Read more
Despite the vast amount of venture capital funding that startup companies receive every year (US$48 billion in 2014), many of them fail to succeed over the long term. Apparently, access to financial means is not the only important factor for success. Other essentials can easily be identified when trying to assess the success or failure of startups. Beginning with the … Read more
The Viennese startup ecosystem is a hidden jewel. When I moved to Vienna last February, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the city I now call home is one of the most vivid, diverse and fastly growing scenes in Europe. And as all good treasure hunt stories go – it was by pure coincidence that … Read more
Nowadays, there are several discussions about a potential tech bubble in the US Venture industry. Valuations of companies like Uber make markets fear that the world is heading towards a crisis similar to the bursting of the dotcom bubble in the first decade of this millennium. But what is actually a “bubble”? There is a wide range of literature about economic … Read more
Many practitioners at venture capital funds use net present value (NPV) and discounted cash flow (DCF) as methods during their valuation process of early-stage companies. In fact, the International Private Equity and Venture Capital Valuation Guidelines focus mainly on those two methods. The weakness of these two methods is that they concentrate on a certain “expected scenario” of cashflows. For … Read more
Once confronted with the problem of evaluating an early stage company for the first time, you will find a number of valuation methods and sooner or later you will question yourself, which model does consider all the relevant factors.
The absence of comparable companies, the inexistence of historical data, the complexity to estimate volatility, and the large number of intangible … Read more
