Annual Letter 2021/2022

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Dear Friends

We launched VarsoGroup in the summer of 2019 to become an invaluable resource for ambitious scaleups active in the digital economy in Europe. We set out with a clear vision to support several critical company scaleup challenges around team leadership, product growth, and fundraising activities. As we enter 2022, based on our search for a compelling product-market fit, we have decided to double down on our position as fiercely independent expert advisors in early-stage fundraising and M&A.

Let us recap what we have achieved in a short timeframe:

  • More than 100 client invoices have been issued and paid. Whilst the number of invoices by itself is not an important benchmark, it demonstrates that we have moved beyond the initial startup tinkering to delivering services that matter to our clients
  • Advised 20 companies from 6 different countries that are commonly providing recurring revenue products in different digital TMT and SaaS verticals like data analytics, eCommerce, IoT, data centers and enterprise software. Early-stage fundraising and M&A is an international affair and shares common opportunities and challenges across similar business models in different verticals
  • Completed 3 venture capital and debt fundraising projects, conducted 12 strategic projects in preparation for fundraising, and been engaged on 4 cross border M&A assignments. As our pipeline of new projects is exceptionally strong, we continue to invest in new resources and capabilities bullishly
  1. edrone raised USD 2.5M in new primary VC equity and a small secondary Angel round with our support. We are presently in the process of raising a new combined equity and debt round with an expected close in Q2 2022
  2. A group of Polish VC firms engaged us to find a new owner for a non-disclosed data analytics startup, and we have actively engaged with several potential international strategic buyers
  3. Adscanner raised EUR 2.4M in new equity, and a non-disclosed Dutch company is closing a new equity and debt round of nearly EUR 10M with our support by January 2022
  4. Green Edge Compute is launching a pilot data center in Q1 2022, and we are supporting their strategic business plan development in preparation for future fundraising activities

Going forward, we plan to automate as much as possible and to become even more data-driven. As examples of this, we are building extensive databases of VC and strategic investors, including their investment criteria for ease and quality of outreach, and we commit to sharing and publishing our research. See an example here concerning fifteen years of VC investments into Polish software startups.