It's healthy to remain wary of lists in this day and age, but we think this one deserves some attention: meet 50 of Europe's fastest-growing tech companies, as compiled by Tech Tour and partners.
Released today at the annual Tech Tour Growth Forum in Geneva, the list includes some obvious and familiar names such as Klarna, Spotify, BlaBlaCar, SoundCloud, Deezer, Adyen and TransferWise. They are deemed to be "pre-exit" companies according to the accompanying press release, likely because these companies have raised big rounds of funding and have proven that they are able to scale in the past few years.
There are some names on the Tech Tour Growth 50 list that might not be so familiar, however. Namely companies like Accedo, Talend, Order Dynamics, Quandoo, Oodrive and Calastone might not be on everyone's radar.
Also read: These were the 20 biggest EU tech funding rounds of 2014
And yet there are clearly some household names missing from the list. Food delivery portal Foodpanda is included, but its arguably larger privately-held rivals, Delivery Hero and Takeaway.com, are not.
Also oddly missing are companies like Kobalt (just raised $60 million in a round led by Google Ventures), Momondo (quite literally "pre-exit") and Elastic (secured $70 million less than a year ago).
Also, no Prezi, HelloFresh, Huddle, iZettle or DataSift to be found on the list. Etc etc.
Be that as it may, this is a nice effort and a testament that it's actually becoming difficult making exhaustive lists of European tech companies poised for greatness.
For what it's worth: the Tech Tour Growth 50 list was assembled with the help of Go4Venture Advisers, which researched and evaluated data from its proprietary database of large private transactions, as well as Dow Jones VentureSource. The research was conducted over the past three months, in conjunction with the International Venture Club.
The selection committee included the likes of Ophelia Brown (Index Ventures), Cem Sertoglu (Earlybird), Sasha Galitsky (Almaz Capital), Daniel Bertholet (Endeavor) and Per Roman (GP Bullhound).
Some of the criteria for selection: the companies raised at least $20 million, had an annual revenue rate higher than $10 million, and were valued at more than $100 million during research.
Also (and perhaps why many familiar names are not on the list): the Tech Tour Growth 50 companies have demonstrated 50% sales growth for the last three consecutive full calendar years.
Broken down by country, there are few surprises: big European markets such as the UK, France, Russia and Germany score high, and a few major tech stars in Sweden, The Netherlands, Spain and Denmark helped those countries to get onto this particular map.
Also perhaps interesting to some: a break-down per investor type.
William Stevens, Managing Director of Tech Tour, commented on the list:
“We are building more and bigger tech companies in Europe at a faster rate than ever. The multi-billion dollar success stories that grab our attention via public market listings or sales to much larger companies are, however, just the tip of the iceberg.
Through the Tech Tour Growth 50 we wanted to shine a light on the rest of Europe’s high-tech, high-growth businesses. In the last decade Tech Tour Growth 50 Companies alone have created over 15,000 tech jobs.”
That would be since 1998 according to the press release, which is actually almost two decades at this point, but still. According to Tech Tour, 75% of the companies on the list were started in the last 10 years - the median year of company foundation is 2007.
Also worth noting: 47 of the 50 companies have at least one US investor, and the 50 companies on the list have raised an average of 4 funding rounds each. Since 1998, the companies on the latest Tech Tour Growth 50 list have raised almost $5 billion in aggregate.
Featured image credit: iWorkAlone / Shutterstock
