Grants funding profiles of leading VC portfolio companies

Introduction

This research focuses on the top Venture Capital firms located across several European regions: France & Benelux, Nordics, DACH, Southern Europe, UK & Ireland, CEE, and Israel.

For each investor/VC, we identified what investment stage they specialise in (pre-seed, seed, series A) and the number of companies in their portfolio. From their investment profile, we filtered through all the companies in their profile to identify how many had received grant funding.   

Analysis of the portfolio companies

Only 9.6% of European VC portfolio companies have a grant funding history.  

This represents the regional average of the percentage of firms in the Venture Capital portfolio that have previously received grant funding. We found that the UK and Ireland region had the highest average, with 16% of firms in their portfolio receiving previous grant funding. Conversely, France & Benelux had the lowest percentage at just 5%. 

This graph represents the average, by country, of the percentage of firms in the Venture Capital portfolio that have previously received grant funding. Throughout the European countries we looked at, we found that Iceland had the most grant funding VCs at 36%, and Ireland and Lithuania were up there. However, we found that Slovenia and Malta had 0% grant funding VC firms.

Previously conducted research revealed that if you have received private funding, there is a 70% chance of getting government funding. If only 9.6% of privately funded companies get government grants, there is a significantly higher chance for these companies to get government funding.