Nauta’s 2021 Wrapped — Here Are Our Top Highlights

From a record-breaking number of new investments to closing our 5th fund and launching new initiatives, we wanted to wrap up our year here at Nauta – now that we all know what everyone has been listening to on Spotify! 

So, without further ado, here are our top 5 highlights from 2021. 

💰💰 We closed our #5th Fund 

After an extremely busy year fundraising and investing simultaneously, we were over the moon to unveil the closing of our fifth fund at €190M, and surpassing our initial €150M target. 

Taking our AUM to €550M and helping us become one of Europe’s largest early-stage B2B focused funds, we were thrilled to be in the position to continue backing even more European B2B startups as they move industries forward. 

We explained our thesis and journey here. 

🍾🍾 4 Portfolio Companies Flew the Nest  

1. Nine years after we partnered with Brandwatch, the global leader in digital consumer intelligence and social media listening, the UK scaleup was acquired for $450 million by Cision. Read the founder’s inspiring journey here. 
2. This was followed by Visma acquiring Holded, provider of the fastest-growing cloud ERP & accounting software in Spain. Having backed Holded in 2018 during their seed round, we were proud to see the founders make history as one of Spain’s largest SaaS exits to date. 
3. Meanwhile, one of Nauta’s Finnish portfolio companies, Smarp, merged with Germany’s COYO to form a global Top 5 software provider in the employee communications and engagement space. 
4. And lastly, we exited from TAPTAP Digital, after bd-capital, the pan-European, operationally led private equity firm, made its latest investment into TAPTAP Digital. 

🚀🚀 10 New Companies Joined Our Community 

We partnered with a record-breaking 10 new companies either at Seed or Series A this year. You can find out more about them below. Worth mentioning; these are only those we publicly announced, with many others to be announced in Q1 2022.  

• Gophr 🇬🇧— Gophr is one of the UK’s leading next-generation delivery specialists, helping businesses of all shapes and sizes optimise and scale their last-mile logistics.  
• Kubermatic 🇩🇪 — Kubermatic empowers organizations to automate all aspects of their Kubernetes and cloud-native operations across multi-cloud, edge and on-prem data centres.  
• Ifeel 🇪🇸— ifeel is the all-in-one emotional well-being platform for organisations and individuals.  
• InsureQ 🇩🇪 — insureQ offers a fully digitized insurance solution for the self-employed as well as small and micro-businesses.  
• Nhost 🇸🇪 — Nhost is a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) and application platform that enables its users to build scalable applications faster.  
• Trustshare 🇬🇧 — trustshare is a fintech building borderless escrow infrastructure for online purchases.  
• WeeCover 🇪🇸 — Weecover aims to revolutionise the insurance sector through embedded insurance. 
• Treblle 🇭🇷 — Treblle makes it super easy to understand what’s going on with your APIs and the apps that use them.  
• QueryLayer 🇪🇸 — QueryLayer is the world’s first No-Code Privacy Platform for Good Data Brands.  
• Bird Eats Bug 🇩🇪 — Bird Eats Bug is a SaaS tool that helps companies save time on technical issues.  

💡💡 We Explored Pre-Seed DeepTech Startups via Labs 

During the summer, we announced a brand-new initiative called Nauta Labs. The premise was simple: to support 12-16 pre-seed deeptech companies across Europe with the capital needed to help them accelerate their concepts.  

Focusing on startups within verticals including cybersecurity, quantum technologies, advanced AI/ML, commercial open-source software, and developer tools, we started investing between £100K — £250K per startup through our Nauta Labs programme this year.  

And as we’re almost halfway through the Labs programme, you can get to know the first 5 companies backed under Nauta Labs here. 

✍ ✍ We Deep Dived & Shared Industry Trends 

It wasn’t all about writing cheques, however, as we also took the time to deep-dive into several verticals and explored key trends shaping our ecosystem. 

• We dived into the world of Open-Source Software to explore its commercialisation, current state of play and why we think Open Source is Eating Europe. 
• We demystified the emerging trends shaping the future of insurance and the role insurtech startups played in enabling the transformation of this $5 trillion industry. 
• And lastly, we explored the highly competitive landscape of startup PR. 

It has been a memorable year; full of challenges and opportunities. And the truth is, we would not have been able to achieve any of this without the founders who chose us, the limited partners who supported our thesis. and of course, our amazing team below. 

From all of us, thank you!  

PS: We even managed to meet IRL for the first time in 18 months in sunny Mallorca back in October ☀️