Report Methodology Overview
Given the early stage of the companies we focused heavily on the quality of the team and the funding velocity.
We examined all types of B2B Cloud companies and business models. We included subscription, transaction and usage-based revenue models. We focused on the early stage and examined companies that haven’t yet raised a Series A; this report focuses on pre-seed and seed stage businesses.
We have relied exclusively on information available in the public domain; and we built our scoring formula around the following factors:
Founders and team:
- Founders and composition of the executive team
- Founders’ previous experience; including companies they’ve previously worked for, educational institutions and their relevance to the project
- Whether they have founded successful companies in the past
- Whether they are able to attract top talent to the business
- Overall headcount growth
Fundraising journey:
- Strength of the investor syndicate
- Whether the company has been able to attract smart capital that will reliably support the business on its onward journey
- Funding velocity (the amount of capital raised within a timeframe)
- Market adoption (product reviews, general sentiment within user communities)
There is, of course, one further question as to what it now means for a business to be European. For B2B Software Companies founded post-2016, Covid-19 has unlocked the ability for a team to ‘work from anywhere’ more than ever before, making it harder to meaningfully geographically locate businesses. As such, we have considered two criteria in deciding whether a business can be defined as ‘European’: where the majority of the workforce is based and the nationality of its founders.