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Lazard's 2024 T100 Index
February 2024
The T100 is Lazard VGB's carefully curated index containing the most exciting venture and growth-backed businesses in Europe The companies span different stages, sectors and geographies to broadly reflect the wider fundraising environment across Europe
2024 European Venture and Growth Outlook
January 2024
2023 was a period of reset for the European Venture & Growth markets. Heading into 2024, we believe there are five key questions which we address within our Outlook:
- Will central banks’ easing cycle be driven by disinflation or recession?
- Will liquidity across the Venture & Growth capital cycle improve?
- Will the funding shift into hard technologies continue to gain momentum?
- To what extent will sectors with lower 2023 activity recover?
- Will AI continue to dominate the larger funding rounds and which other verticals will outperform?
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The Increasingly Horizontal Climate Software Opportunity
November 2023
Through conversations with private market investors and sector experts, as well as organic market research, we’ve concluded that climate software will likely soon be widely viewed as a horizontal investment opportunity supporting a continually expanding set of cross-industry applications. Software plays a vital role in advancing the clean energy transition by:
- Buttressing the efficiency and resiliency of energy and infrastructure assets
- Enabling broad enterprise adherence to regulatory and voluntary reporting and decarbonization trends
- Appealing to a broad spectrum of private market investors seeking attractive end-market use cases
T500 Conference 2023 Video Highlights
October 2023
The T500 is Europe's largest dedicated venture & growth conference, held each year in London by Lazard's VGB team. The conference brings together the T100 Index containing Europe's most exciting venture & growth backed businesses, and the T400 representing the 400 most active investors in the European venture ecosystem. In 2023, we were delighted to welcome 70 companies and 600 investors across 3 days at the IET Conference Centre in London. Each morning we had panels, fireside chats and keynote speakers, the highlights of which you can see here.
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3Q23 European Venture Capital Review
October 2023
We break down our 3Q23 review into four short sections:
- Public Markets: First negative print of the year for equity markets, and rising longer-dated yields pressured both bond and equity valuations
- European Fundraising: Venture & Growth markets improved sequentially (+22%), but remain below 2022 levels (-23%). DeepTech, InfraTech and Healthcare account for 74% of total funding
- Deal round-up: We pick out notable deals in Energy Transition and Life Sciences, amongst other areas
- Fund flows: We note that VC firms with strong track records continue to raise capital, European company delinquencies rise, and IPOs / strategic exits show nascent signs of a rebound
Vertical SaaS + Payments
September 2023
In this report, we outline how European independent software vendors (ISVs) have integrated payment capabilities within their product offering. Our key takeaways are three-fold:
- Merchant acquirers who have historically held direct merchant relationships have experienced increasing disintermediation risk from i) payment service providers and ii) ISVs.
- There is a wide dispersion of payment enablement across vertical markets, ranging from: highly penetrated offline hospitality verticals like wellness and restaurants, through to more complex industries which focus on software, such as energy and construction.
- Our bottom-up analysis of ten vertical software markets has identified a group of around 20 interesting ISVs in Europe.
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2Q23 European Venture Capital Review
July 2023
We break down our 2Q23 review into four short sections:
- Public Markets: Resilient performance from public equities despite real yields above 2% and a deeply inverted yield curve
- European Fundraising: Venture & Growth markets improved sequentially (+25%), but remain well below 2022 levels (-61%)
- Deal round-up: We pick out notable deals in Life Sciences and Generative AI, amongst other areas
- Fund flows: We assess the velocity of capital in the venture & growth market, breaking down the liquidity cycle into three stages: i) GP fundraising, ii) capital deployment, iii) exits/returns.
AI Commercialization
July 2023
Our new report examines go-to-market and pricing strategies for 150 of the most promising venture-backed AI companies. The analysis highlights key learnings and establishes benchmarks to assess which models are likely to help companies differentiate as the market matures
- 3x: AI market leaders average ~3x the number of pricing/sales channels than their emerging peers
- Barbell Market: Flurry of deals early + capital highly-concentrated late = opportunities for Series B/C investors
- Verticalizing Apps: Commercialization timelines likely to condense as vertical software apps overtake DeepTech models
- Partnerships Prevail: Corporates are buying, investing, and partnering to determine early infrastructure winners
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Checking into Hotel Management Software
June 2023
The first report in our vertical software series explores:
- Size of the market opportunity
- Different business models and capital formation
- Recent strategic M&A objectives
- Our view on the valuation environment
Post RSA 2023 Review of the Cybersecurity Landscape
May 2023
This report summarizes some key trends in cybersecurity including:
- Current market perspectives and learnings from 2022
- Emerging threat trends
- Securing the software supply chain
- Zero trust identity protection becomes table stakes
- Securing AI/ML solutions an emerging, dynamic challenge
- XDR is driving the modernization of security operations
- Attackers increasing focus on data opportunities
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Digital Health Q1'23
April 2023
Our latest report on the healthcare tech space explores:
- Post-pandemic trends are still transforming the industry
- Consumers seeking loyalty, personalization
- Improving the revenue cycle
- Data sharing key to progressing outcomes-based care
- The evolving role of AI in healthcare
- Hybrid, chronic condition, and specialty care solutions
- The talent and skills crisis demands software solutions
- Governance, privacy, and security in focus
1Q23 European Venture Capital Review
April 2023
This report marks the first quarterly review of the European venture & growth market from VGB Insights. In the report we aim to do three things:
- Provide an overview of key trends across 1Q23
- Include a round-up of deal flow and investor participation
- Outline key challenges for the asset class in the coming quarters
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Lazard's 2023 T100 Index
March 2023
The T100 is a carefully curated list of the most interesting private companies in Europe that we expect to undertake a venture growth style financing in the next 12-18 months
2023 World Agri-Tech Summit
March 2023
The summit confirmed the growing investor appetite for AgriTech and FoodTech solutions given:
- The sectors are underfunded relative to other segments of energy transition
- There is robust investment opportunity in areas like biologics, biofuels, and gene editing
- Net zero goals require a fundamental change to the food system. (production processes account for more than one-third of greenhouse gas emissions)
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2023 Venture & Growth Outlook
January 2023
Our 2023 outlook explores themes across each of our 6 sectors:
- InfraTech: Voluntary carbon markets
- Enterprise Software: The modern data stack
- FinTech: Embedded finance
- Healthcare: Value-based care-enabling technology
- DeepTech: Sorting through the AI landscape
- Consumer: TravelTech
Navigating ShipTech
January 2023
Our positive thesis on ShipTech is driven by:
- Fragmented and under-digitized market
- Growing ESG tide accelerating the need for digital solutions
- Large addressable market that we estimate to be $5-8bn
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U.S. Enterprise Software
October 2022
Read our key reflections post the 2022 SaaStr conference including:
- Resilience of SaaS models in the fundraising market
- Valuations beginning to normalise
- Investors gravitating towards earlier rounds
- Efficient operations prioritized over growth
- Value opportunities for M&A
Venturing Inside Fulfilment
October 2022
E-commerce fulfilment continues to benefit from:
- Increasing online penetration
- Attractive unit economics
- Increased private capital flows
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Revenue Based Financing
Auguest 2022
We break down the revenue-based financing market aiming to:
- Size the potential target market
- Explore key demand drivers
- Unpack the operating model
- Evaluate performance through the business cycle
- Outline possible key risks
- Highlight recent funding levels
T500 2022
June 2022
Our review of our T500 conference addresses 10 key themes from the event:
- Startups transforming Europe
- Tech accelerating energy transition
- Impact capital flowing into infratech
- Sustainability a key driver of consumer demand
- Gen Z moves into the metaverse
- AI transforming healthcare
- Finance replatforming and decentralising
- SaaS becoming narrower and deeper
- AI finally coming of age
- Inclusion is a driver of growth
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