This trend came through hard and fast in 2018 across numerous industries. Financial services has long since been an industry where venture-backed companies, such as N26 and Monzo, actively leveraged their fully licensed banking status to strengthen their market positions. In the digital health space, messaging-centric applications such as Forward Health and Siilo have overcome barriers to become powerful new services in their local health systems in the UK and Netherlands respectively. Perhaps the strongest example of the change in founder attitudes towards regulation, however, has come in the emerging micro-mobility market. European micro-mobility startups such as VOI and Tier have explicitly pointed to their pro-regulation approach as a key source of competitive advantage as they seek to capture the hearts and minds of European consumers and policymakers and to steal a march on US players entering the European markets.

In the purest sense, this did not come to pass. There was no single acquisition of a European VC-backed company for more than $1 billion to a traditional non-tech European giant. But that’s not to say that there was not plenty of relevant M&A activity that validated this trend. In fact, the year started in January with Richemont’s acquisition of full control of the European, formerly-VC-backed, but now public company Yoox Net-a-Porter for an implied total enterprise value of around $6 billion. Siemens, the German industrial giant, acquired Mendix, a Netherlands-born, -funded and -raised enterprise software company, for $730 million. In other smaller, but still meaningful transactions, ING Group acquired Payvision for a fee that valued the business at more than $500 million, while Munich Re acquired Berlin’s Relayr for $300 million. All this taken together, we think this deserves a half mark.

This trend has certainly taken hold in Europe in 2018, driven by increasing levels of competition for talent in core European tech hubs and a growing awareness of the depth of talent in emerging hubs. According to the more than 1,000 founders that responded to this year’s State of European Tech Survey, more than 50% of companies with more than 100 employees have already opened satellite offices to tap new talent pools and 80% of those founders expressed increased interested in opening additional offices. As one example, N26 has opened its first major office outside of Berlin, choosing Barcelona to build an office that will quickly expand to 100 employees.

This did not happen, at least not publicly. In 2018, making any sort of prediction around the state of the crypto market proved particularly dangerous given the extreme level of volatility in the market and an enduring bear market. The price of crypto assets has inevitably dominated the headlines through the year, but under the surface European teams have continued to make progress and raise funds from top tier European investors, often via traditional equity. Argent, for example, raised capital from Index Ventures and Creandum.