New figures from Dealroom and London & Partners show London’s tech firms raised an impressive £16.2bn ($19.8bn) last year.
The UK capital’s tech firms raised double the amount of investment than any European city in 2022 and ranked fourth on the global stage.
London helped boost the total amount of VC funding secured by UK tech firms in 2022 to £24.5bn ($29.9bn), making it the third largest country for tech investment behind the US and China.
Some of the biggest funding rounds into London companies last year included: a $1bn Series D round for Checkout.com; a $312m Series G round for Go Cardless and a $200m Series D for Paddle.
According to the data, 2022 global VC funding experienced a 33 per cent dip from the record levels seen in 2021, with a total £398bn ($485.2bn) raised last year, compared with £593bn ($723bn) the previous year.
This trend was replicated at a European level, with a total of $94bn raised in 2022 – a 22 per cent decline on the £99bn ($120.8bn) raised in 2021.
The future investment landscape for London and UK companies remains optimistic with further analysis from Dealroom revealing an increasing volume of growth capital being added by VCs to new funds in London.
The total amount of fresh capital raised by London-based VCs in 2022 was £5.4bn ($6.6bn), more than any previous year. This takes the overall total raised in the past years (2021 and 2022) to £9.34bn ($11.4bn).
Some of the world’s largest investment firms have established new funds or a presence in London in the past year.
Significant new funds based out of London include a £800m ($1bn) early-stage fund from Northzone, a £533m ($650m) European investment fund from Atomico and a $500m fund from Phoenix Court, whose funds include LocalGlobe and Latitude.
Additionally, the likes of Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Ventures and General Catalyst have all recently expanded their presence in the UK capital.
A number of London’s fastest growing tech sectors managed to buck the overall downward funding trends in 2022, with over 10 different sub sectors raising over £410m ($500m).
According to the data from Dealroom, London’s Edtech, Cybersecurity and gaming sectors all raised more funding in 2022 than 2021.
Major funding rounds in these areas included: a £180m ($220m) Series D round for London-based EdTech provider Multiverse, which was founded by Euan Blair, son of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a £91m ($112m) investment into immersive and gaming company, Improbable.
London’s FinTech sector also saw a strong performance in 2022, with the UK capital’s fintech firms raising a total of £7.9bn ($9.7bn) – more than any other city globally.
In addition to seeing more investment than the likes of New York and the Bay Area, London FinTech’s accounted for 42 per cent of the total funding into all European FinTech last year.
Another sector showing promising signs of future growth for London is impact tech – companies that put at least one of the UN’s sustainable development goals at the heart of their mission.
London’s impact tech companies raised over £1.64bn ($2bn) in VC funding last year and now accounts for more than 10 per cent of all London VC funding for the first time.
Laura Citron, CEO of London & Partners, said: “London‘s tech sector is looking resilient, despite the challenging context. Investors have raised more capital to deploy into high-growth companies than ever before.
“Innovation in London continues to be grounded in the city’s deep historic strengths – so we see sectors like Fintech, EdTech and gaming thrive. This data shows that London continues to be Europe’s tech capital and one of the best places in the world to scale a tech business.”
Julia Hawkins, partner at London based VC firm, Phoenix Court, said: “London is at the centre of a remarkable region of tech growth that spreads from the capital’s centre to other UK clusters including Manchester, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge and beyond to Paris and Amsterdam.
“We expect some of the world’s biggest companies to be built from here in the next 20 years as the capital continues to attract significant investment thanks to its talent base and global leadership in fields such as life sciences, fintech and Artificial Intelligence.”
Dealroom.co is the foremost data provider on startups, growth companies and tech ecosystems in Europe and around the globe.