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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I'm impressed about the amount. While my impression is that these days, a Silicon Valley startup can "easily" raise multiple millions over little more than a few launching customers, getting large investments in Europe has repeatedly been proven difficult. Is this a sign that things are changing? Or was my assumption wrong from the start?

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I posted this here partly because I see fairly large amounts raised in Europe on a regular basis, but this seems to happen in completely different "spheres" than HN, and results in people thinking nothing is raised (which appears not true from what I came across).

I will try to write those down for the future and share back.

Right! I'm European but HN really is my only news source for things like this. Care to point out some main places in these completely different "spheres"?

Please note I didn't want to be pedantic with "spheres", first :-) Just trying to pick a word reflecting that HN has a focus on only a part of what exists.

It's mostly via twitter that I see those, but here are examples this week:

- http://www.rudebaguette.com/2012/11/26/teleportd-nitrogram-i... ($1M)

- http://www.pehub.com/174632/youscribe-raises-e2-million/ (€2M)

- http://frenchweb.fr/la-ruche-qui-dit-oui-leve-15-million-eur... (€1.5M)

I'l add:

- http://www.rudebaguette.com/2012/10/11/iadvize/ (€1M)

- http://www.rudebaguette.com/2012/10/17/clever-cloud-launch/ (amount not disclosed)

From their history[0]:

> At the end of May 2010, Julien Tartarin and Wilfried Durand meet...

> We pull all-nighters and the product takes shape. A bêta version is launched after Le Web 2010. The first version goes live in February 2011. One year after, Mailjet gathers more thant 15 collaborators and sends tens of millions each week!

Also, check their job offers page [1]

I'd say they're already on cruise mode, and gathering people and funds to grow. Here investments of such scale are reserved to low risk, well established start-ups.

[0] http://www.mailjet.com/About-us.htm

[1] http://www.mailjet.com/jobs

Interesting to note that two of the founders (Thibaud Elziere and Quentin Nickmans) seem to have raised €1.64 million for one of their other startup (TextMaster) 10 days ago from the same VC firm [1].

Apparently, eFounders (that participated in this round) is their incubator where they are building other French startups.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/19/textmaster/

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