Key Sentence:
- Lightspeed Venture Partners hires Paul Murphy and Ross Mason to advance Europe while Silicon Valley VCs drive demand for deals across the continent.
The VC’s relocation of funds to Menlo Park – which backs Snapchat, Affirm, and Paul Murphy, Epic Games – is due to its roots in London as fundraising and valuations of European startups have skyrocketed over the past year.
This year alone, investors have invested more than $50 billion in European startups. With the continent’s most valuable startup, Klarna, rising from $10 billion in September to $45.6 billion in June. Paul Murphy The dollar has risen. The change comes as investors stop seeing Europe as an arbitrage game. With typically lower ratings than US rivals, and see the potential for the UK and European startups to become global winners, Murphy said.
“This is a moment for Europe. Great founders are building so many great companies, and they are all ready now,” said Murphy.
Murphy said that the generation of European founders who have gained experience or sold companies to Silicon Valley startups. Talented developers, and a large, albeit fragmented, market has now triggered a jump in valuation.
Murphy led the investment in Hopin, an event platform that rose to $7.5 billion just two years after launch; Starting from e-scooter Tier Mobility and video game developer Klang, after turning to early-stage investor Northzone based in London in 2018. He is also co-founder of video game studio The Dots, sold to Take-Two Interactive for $192 million. In August 2020, and Giphy’s GIF library, which Facebook bought in May 2020 in a $400 million deal. The British antitrust authorities will now announce the deal.
Murphy is accompanied by Mason, who will be outside Geneva. Lightspeed helped the UK entrepreneur roll out MuleSoft to cloud data. Which Salesforce acquired in a $6.5 billion deal in March 2020. Mason will continue to invest in cloud, software as a service (SaaS). And startups like ComplyAdvantage through the Dig Ventures Family Fund. and Lightspeed Counseling.
“We have so many unicorn success stories in Europe now. As a result, there is more talent to run a big tech company, and that helps propel the next generation of companies to be more successful and faster,” said Mason, partner at Lightspeed. told Ravi [Mhatre, Managing Director of Lightspeed] that I was going back to Europe, he said, ‘Let’s find a way to work together, and that is typical of Lightspeed … they work together a lot.”