VC Per Capita: Finland $46, Sweden $45 (US $72, Europe $7)
Last week we published a post on venture capital per capita. In those figures, Europe was shown in a light not too respectable. Where as Israel received a whopping $142 of venture capital per capita, Europe was at mere $7. Last week some other interesting statistics came out regarding Finland's investment amounts for this year. Mikko Suonenlahti, in a Kauppalehti article, forecasts Finland to receive some 175 million euro of investments this year. If you divide this by the 5.37 million people Finland has, it turns out to some $46 per capita, only this year. Naturally we wanted to find out what the figure is for Sweden and it's pretty close: $45 per capita (overall investments 2.67 billion SEK and a population of 9.35 million people).
VC Per Capita: Europe $7, US $72, Israel $142
In Europe we've come to realise it that while there are certain hotspots, to among which Northern Europe is slowly growing into, venture capital in general is extremely scarce compared to other parts of the world. Jan Müehlfeit, Microsoft’s European chairman, spoke this week in Brussles to TechEurope, in a Microsoft Bizspark summit, about the differences and challenges Europe faces as an area for entrepreneurs. Venture capital is clearly one of them.
