2018 was an amazing year for startup financing in Rhine-Main

2018 marks the first year we are covering completely with our initiative. This year startups broke 150 mn Euros financing for 2018 in total. To be precise, the tracked money raised totaled 153,723 million Euros.

This is amazing work, congratulations to all involved parties. These congratulations include the hard-working people in startups, funds, business angels, law firms, consultancies, auditors and many more.

These numbers included the IPOs of Germany’s first pure play fintech do be listed on public markets, as well as the first IPO of an insurtech in all of Europe.

Methodolgy

We would like to note that this is a preliminary version and we are in discussion with several startups to get their precise numbers. This would lead to upward corrections of our numbers.

Let’s see why: Startups in Frankfurt announced several “seven digits” VC rounds, which are in our tracker as 1.000.000,00 € each. As soon as we get the specific amounts raised (which could range from 1,0–9,9 million) we will correct the numbers. This correction would necessarily lead to an upward correction.

Initial Public Offering

This is now the largest financing category we have been tracking. This is actually not surprising since Frankfurt has the best capital market access of all cities in Germany.

The first pure play fintech and insurtech have conducted an IPO in 2018 in Frankfurt. Actually, both have also been headquartered in Frankfurt as well. Please note here that we only track the startups in Rhine-Main, all other startup listings in Frankfurt are not included in our tracker. Both transactions together raised 68.5 mn Euros.

The first pure play fintech to list in Germany was the credit marketplace creditshelf. It was rewarded with a successful IPO in Q3 and raised 16,5 million Euros.

Next came the insurtech Deutsche Familienversicherung, which raised 52 million Euros. This was the first successful IPO of an insurtech in Europe. The listing took place in December 2018.

Venture Capital

The second largest category we have been tracking contains traditional venture capital, either invested by funds or individuals. These investments included debt and equity deals. The startups raised more than 48,43 mn Euros. In total, we have identified more than 20 deals. The field was dominated by all types of fintech (12 deals), including insurtech, proptech, payments and the like. On the other hand, these numbers also include money raised by startups active in healthcare, cybersecurity, IoT and software. In Rhine-Main fintech is important, but the startup scene has greater diversity.

Initial Coin Offering

The instrument of an ICO was introduced to Rhine Main on a large scale by the fintech savedroid, which reportedly raised at least 35 mn Euros (depending on sources much more) with their ICO.

We keep in touch with several other ICOs, but the current decline in crypto prices leads to a very long and hard process to raise money in ICOs. All ICOs we are currently tracking have been extending their deadlines and came down with their expectations of capital to be raised. In many cases, there have been several corrections on both fronts.

Crowdfunding

The instrument seems to be out of favor for 2018. We will keep track of it anyways.

Keep up to date

You can keep up to date, by following our Blog here, our Twitter account or on Facebook. On the social media channels, we also post on these channels content related to venture financing in the greater Rhine Main Region.

Hashtags to follow

Have a look on Twitter for Frankfurt and the wider Rhein-Main area: #rheinmainrocks, #frmstartupscene #rheinmainstartups #frankfurtvalley or #startupradio

Exchange rate used in all 2018 calculations: 1 US$ = 0,81 Euros

Jörn Menninger for the partners of RhineMain.vc