And if “Tech M&As” was the strongest indicator ?
And if “tech M&As” was the strongest indicator?
#TechWatchbySeb Weekly Issue #13 — March 1st 2021
Hello my friends 🖐,
and welcome back to the Monday #TechWatchbySeb ☕️
Since the beginning of the year, 6 major M&A deals involving European tech companies have found their way into my weekly news review, #TechWatchbySeb.
And this week, again I’ll share with you later 2 important M&A that happened recently in Europe. All this reminded me of a very interesting article by Alexandre Dewez looking at the emergence of “French Tech Mafias”, similarly to the Paypal Mafia in the US.
So what is a tech Mafia ?
We could define it as entrepreneurs that have realised a very strong success on behalf of a “company” and after exiting the company, have kept a close relationship with the executive and / or co-founders by financing their new ventures.
Among the most well known Mafia, there are the Paypal or Google in the US that are at the centre of Silicon Valley. In Europe, we can count on the Skype Mafia which is pretty dynamic in Europe as shown in the article. And more recently, an article presented a new one stemming from the UK’s unicorn Transferwise.
Why is it a good thing for the European Tech Ecosystem?
As stated in Alexandre Dewez’s newsletter, he summarised the impact of the US tech mafia on the ecosystem, and I kind of agree with the positive outcomes :
Venture funds will rush to hire employees from these mafias to have a better access to the companies funded by their peers;
Startup mafias employees will start venture funds to back their former colleagues when they also leave to build their own company;
Employees from startups which exited successfully will start their own funds challenging the existing venture capital landscape;
Companies which feel that they have a culture prone to the rise of a startup mafia will launch a fund to invest in its own employees who are leaving to build a company.
Thus from those tech mafias we can see a very strong virtuous cycle of successful entrepreneurs bringing their experiences, skills to newly created companies, or funds to support the creation of other successful businesses. Also, when an M&A is successful it gives new liquidity to venture investors that will reinvested into new projects.
With the acceleration of M&A activity in Europe, will we also see more startup mafias forming in the Old Continent?
Speaking of European acquisitions, let’s dive into the top 3 news from last week:
#TECHWATCHBYSEB — WEEKLY ISSUE #13
🥇 Brandwatch acquired by Cision for $450M
Brandwatch 🇬🇧 the consumer intelligence and social media listening platform has been acquired by the US company Cision with the ambition to build a global leader in PR, Marketing and Social Listening.
Congratulations to the 3 European lead investors: Nauta Capital 🇬🇧 , Highland Europe 🇨🇭, Partech Ventures 🇫🇷.
🥈Shell acquires Next Kraftwerke
Next Kraftwerke 🇩🇪, the operator of a Virtual Power Plant (VPP ) & a trader on various European power markets has been acquired by Royal Dutch Shell 🇳🇱as part of plans to expand its business in the electricity market.
🥉 Siemens and IBM extend alliance to IoT for manufacturing
Siemens 🇩🇪 announced to expand, in partnership with IBM 🇺🇸 an existing alliance to include deployments of MindSphere, a managed internet of things (IoT) service provided by Siemens, on an instance of the Red Hat OpenShift platform. The goal is to make it simpler to build edge computing applications that process and analyze data as it is being created
That’s it for this week, wishing you a great week ahead🖐
Stay safe ❤️
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