Business angels are increasingly well-federated across Europe at regional, national and European level and strategic business angels can create very strong market signalling. Some have doubled firepower thanks to the European Angels Fund (EAF).

The number of family offices has exploded world-wide over the past five to ten years due to the growing number of high net-worth individuals.  Besides investing in VC funds as LP's, family offices are increasingly interested in direct investments in promising scale-ups.

Fundraising from VCs in deep tech has always been hard, but the post-pandemic downturn and the debacle of a good many "unicorns" are making it even harder. The upside of VC funding drying up is that this will force investors to focus on business fundamentals and help cash-efficient and milestones-hitting start-ups stand out. 

Start-ups often tend to overlook banks and yet, for revenue-generating companies (or those on the cusp of it), banks can offer an attractive non-dilutive funding avenue, especially in view of the InnovFin programme of the European Investment Fund (EIF) which co-guarantees loans of partner commercial banks across the EU.