Comment by fifilura
11 hours ago
"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
What share of the investor money is from USA?
Being EU company is so hard, you can never pass the purity tests.
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
It's just weird attitude.
Yeah well HN is predominantly for and by American audiences I think and that already explains a lot of the attitude towards non-USA. A lot of Americans seem to think they are the main character in every story, and even if they are not, they try their best to somehow alter the narrative until they are.
For startup finance, which this forum was born from, the US is very much the main character by far.
https://dealroom.co/charts/us-hubs-map
60% of the entire world's startup funding comes from the US.
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AFAIK there are many companies that just create an HQ in USA for the attitude when all the work is done in Poland or Turkey etc.
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You are not wrong. However, I don't see how your point relates to the post to which your responding.
I have traveled the world and the United States is functionally different than every other nation state on the planet.
The primary reason people immigrate to America is so that they can make money or become wealthy in some way. That’s it, there’s no other driver, so in general (not universally) the public doesn’t care whether you get your money from, cause they figure it’s yours now.
Why is that? It’s because it’s the simplest country to start a company and tons of liquid money is here.
You literally only have to have a legal resident of a state create an LLC with somewhere between 10 and $50, and you can start accepting payments for services the same day as incorporating the organization.
The regulations are only on enforcement when they get caught, and fines are usually manageable if you’re profitable, for the major majority of labor activities.
I just don’t think people understand the uniquely anarchic reason America continues to dominate capitalism: “Nobody is practically going to stop you from starting something cause you just move states which have different laws but the money flows fine”
A lot of Europeans are salty about the continent's decline into near irrelevance in terms of leading edge innovation. It's 90% the US and China at this point. But would be great to see that change.
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The CEO did move to the US “to focus on the fastest growing market”. Usually that means that they start building an engineering org there and embracing a more US working culture.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
To be fair, it all depends on the definition you choose. It's often useless to have a general definition. If you try really hard you can claim that Apple is an Irish company or Chinese company. I always buy my MacBooks From Ireland and I can track it arriving from China.
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It matters who owns the company. Where your employees come from matters much less.
As long as there is no investors from Europe, these startups will just be a money funnel to America.
It's actually not just funneling money if the company gives jobs to people in the country as well, paid with the sales of the product sold worldwide. Everyone knows US is where business is done, but it's not like money stays there and never leaves the country. It would make no sense at all if that was the case.
And companies here (in eu) would immediately create a competitor. As long as we both "eat" we're friends.
Americans on HN acting like they have an ownership stake in what their ruling class owns is as much a classic as Europeans coping with having no efficient capital markets.
Isn’t that naturally a function of who owns the most available investor money globally?
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Invest then?
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IDK why all these replies are assuming OP was insinuating some negative judgement. To me, it's interesting that US investors are apparently interested in this EU firm that is pursuing the US market, despite no shortage of US startups in the same space.
Probably because no one is questioning the nationality of the money on any US startups?
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No need to be defensive. It's simply true, and I say that as a European. The money and attitude required for it is just not present in Europe. German money is much more conservative and risk averse. So the funding will have to be from the US. It's perfectly justified to roll one's eyes when these cases are presented as if Europe could produce these companies by itself.
I agree and I am not against taking US money at all. People want to build things and people with money who want to partner with people who want to build things are usually in USA. US has an amazing business and entrepreneurship culture and the capital.
It's an old world attitude.
Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Promus are American. Greenfield is Israeli, and Kindred Capital is British.
Don't know about Lingotto. Looks Italian.
Cherry Ventures is the only German investor. ETC is EU.
Technically, this doesn't answer the question, which was about investment money, not about the investment firms.
Still helps get you to a more accurate answer to know which firms investments to scrutinize no?
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I don’t know what the point is that you’re hinting at?
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
The risk of having primarily foreign, especially American, investors is that the company will leave the EU. Like what we just saw happen with Heart Aerospace [1]. EU needs its own investors.
[1] https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
I think leaving to the US is more a function of business climate than of the investors
yes, but valuations are dogshit, which means capital is scarce, runways are too short, products end up so-so, and startups fail before they gain mindshare, not to mention the long enterprise sales cycles
I don’t know what the point is that you’re making.
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
Money is effectively global these days. A lot of the money in the AI bubble is from all over the place, including Saudi funds and the ubiquitous Softbank.
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
What does "from USA" actually mean? Say I'm a European investor, I've invested my European-earned salary into a company with their HQ in Europe, registered in Delaware. Lets say that money 10x, is that money "from Europe" or "from USA"? Does the paying user-base geolocation matter or what is it that matters to you here, where the business is registered, actually located or something else?
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.