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Projecting Europe’s Metro Population Growth from 2021‒2100

by Aran Ali
This post is by Aran Ali from Visual Capitalist

Top 50 metropolitan regions in Europe population growth

Projecting Europe’s Metro Population Growth from 2021‒2100

European cities have a storied history as global destinations, both for tourism and for immigration.

Despite lengthy histories, they are not immune to the global shifts in population patterns or urbanization. Even though the majority of the EU’s population already lives in urban areas, Europe’s urbanization rate is expected to rise to 84% by 2050.

However, not all cities are subject to that same growth. This visual from Gilbert Fontana uses data from Eurostat and breaks down the expected EU population growth rates for the 50 largest metropolitan regions from 2021 to 2100.

Drivers of Growth

It may come as no surprise that economic prosperity is a key driver of population growth.

Countries like Sweden, France, and Ireland are expected to see large swaths of population growth. Sweden’s largest three cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, are forecasted to experience the largest population growth by 2100 in percentage terms.

Metro regionCountryPopulation (2021)Population (2100)Growth rate (%)
MalmöSweden1,389,3362,009,51044.6%
StockholmSweden2,391,9903,424,31743.1%
GothenburgSweden1,734,4432,449,55241.2%
ToulouseFrance1,434,4391,906,35932.8%
BordeauxFrance1,661,9292,185,09031.4%
DublinIreland2,160,7812,831,08831.0%
BarcelonaSpain5,639,5237,319,53729.7%
LyonFrance1,899,5992,401,55326.4%
MadridSpain6,755,8288,486,42925.6%
NantesFrance1,461,2671,828,15525.1%
RotterdamNetherlands1,834,4172,196,55519.7%
PragueCzech Republic2,733,0813,204,49317.2%
LisbonPortugal2,869,0333,232,62312.6%
ViennaAustria2,890,5773,244,85712.2%
HelsinkiFinland1,702,6781,899,42011.5%
BerlinGermany5,351,7655,968,36511.5%
(Read more...)

Gamestry gets $5M to give games video creators a sweeter deal

by Natasha Lomas

Barcelona-based gaming video platform Gamestry has snatched up $5 million in seed funding, led by Goodwater Capital, Target Global and Kibo Ventures — turning investors’ heads with a 175x growth rate over the past 12 months.

While the (for now) Spanish-language gaming video platform launched a few years back, in 2018, last year the founders decided to shift away from an initial focus on curating purely learning content around gaming — allowing creators to upload and share entertainment-focused games videos, too.

The switch looks to have paid off as a growth tactic. Gamestry says it now has 4M monthly active users (MAUs) and 2,000 active creators in Spain and Latin America (its main markets so far) — and is gunning to hit 20M MAUs by the end of the year.

While Twitch continues to dominate the market for live-streaming games — catering to the esports boom — Gamestry, which says it’s focused on “non-live video content”, reckons there’s a gap for a dedicated on-demand video platform that better supports games-focused video creators and provides games fans with a more streamlined discovery experience than catch-all user-generated content giants like YouTube.

For games video creators, it’s dangling the carrot of a better revenue share than other UGC video platforms — talking about having “a fair ads revenue share model”, and a plan to add more revenue streams for creators “soon”. It also pledges “full transparency on how the monetization structure works”, and a focus on supporting creators if they have technical issues.

So, (Read more...)

TravelPerk buys UK-based Click Travel in latest pandemic purchase

by Natasha Lomas

Business trip booking platform TravelPerk has bagged another rival — picking up UK-based Click Travel. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed but we’re told it’s the third — and largest — acquisition for TravelPerk to date.

The Barcelona-based startup has been on a bit of a shopping spree since the pandemic crisis hit Europe last year, picking up risk management startup Albatross in summer 2020 to bolster resilience to COVID-19’s impacts, before going on to acquire US-based NexTravel in January to expand its presence in the US market.

Business trip platform TravelPerk buys YC-backed rival NexTravel

The latest acquisition deepens TravelPerk’s UK and European business, adding Click Travel’s 2,000+ SME clients (which includes the likes of Five Guys, Red Bull and Talk Talk) to its customer base — which will total just over 5,000 post-acquisition.

The UK company handles some £300M in business travel for its client base, which will bolster TravelPerk’s revenues going forward. The latter now bills itself as the “leading” travel management platform for the SME market globally and the UK as a whole.

“We are a global travel management platform but our core markets are the US and Europe and we expect both markets to be our primary growth areas this year,” said CEO and co-founder Avi Meir. “At the current moment, the US is our largest market due to the covid restrictions in the EU & UK.”

“Assuming travel restrictions won’t be imposed again, we expect to grow by 200% in 2022 (Read more...)

Belvo, LatAm’s answer to Plaid, raises $43M to scale its API for financial services

by Mary Ann Azevedo

Belvo, a Latin American startup which has built an open finance API platform, announced today it has raised $43 million in a Series A round of funding.

A mix of Silicon Valley and Latin American-based VC firms and angels participated in the financing including Future Positive, Kibo Ventures, FJ Labs, Kaszek, MAYA Capital, Venture Friends, Rappi co-founder and president Sebastián Mejía (Rappi), Harsh Sinha, CTO of Wise (formerly Transferwise) and Nubank CEO and founder David Vélez.

Citing Crunchbase data, Belvo believes the round represents the largest series A ever raised by a Latin American fintech. In May 2020, Belvo raised a $10 million seed round co-led by Silicon Valley’s Founders Fund and Argentina’s Kaszek.

Belvo scores $10M from Founders Fund and Kaszek to scale its API for financial services

Belvo aims to work with leading fintechs in Latin America, spanning across verticals like the neobanks, credit providers and personal finance products Latin Americans use every day.

The startup’s goal with its developer-first API platform that can be used to access and interpret end-user financial data is to build better, more efficient and more inclusive financial products in Latin America. Developers of popular neobank apps, credit providers and personal finance tools use Belvo’s API to connect bank accounts to their apps to unlock the power of open banking.

As TechCrunch Senior Editor Alex Wilhelm explained in this piece last year, Belvo might be considered similar to U.S.-based Plaid, but more attuned to the Latin American market so it (Read more...)

Glovo splurges $208M on three Delivery Hero brands in the Balkans

by Natasha Lomas

The high stakes game of chess (or, well, consolidation chicken) that is on-demand food delivery rolls on today with a little more territorial swapping in Europe: Barcelona-based Glovo has agreed to buy three of Berlin-based Delivery Hero’s food delivery brands in Central and Eastern Europe — with deals that it said are worth a total value of €170 million (~$208M).

Specifically, it’s picking up Delivery Hero’s foodpanda brand in Romania and Bulgaria; the Donesi brand in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Pauza in Croatia.

There’s some notable symmetry here: Last year Delivery Hero shelled out $272M for a bunch of Glovo’s LatAm brands, as the latter gave up on a region it had already started withdrawing from in its quest for profitability.

Glovo said then that it would be focusing on “key markets where we can build a long-term sustainable business and continue to provide our unique multi-category offering to our customers”.

Earlier this month the Barcelona-based ‘deliver anything’ app also announced it was picking up Ehrana, a local delivery company in Slovenia. So it’s been on quite the (local) shopping spree of late.

Its existing operational footprint covers markets in South West Europe, Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. So its attention here, on the Balkans, suggests it sees a chance to eke out profitable potential in more of Central Europe too.

Glovo said the transactions in Bosnia Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia are expected to close “within the next few weeks”, subject to fulfilment of (Read more...)

Ranked: The Top 10 Football Clubs by Market Value

by Aran Ali
This post is by Aran Ali from Visual Capitalist

Ranked: The Top 10 Football Clubs by Market Value

The Briefing

  • The top 10 football clubs hold a combined $36 billion in market value
  • English clubs represent 6 of the 10 top football clubs

The Top 10 Football Clubs by Market Value

In the world of football, the stakes are rising due to the amount of dollars injected into the game. In light of the rapid rise and fall of the European Super League (ESL), this graphic covers the top 10 football clubs by market value.

Today, the top 10 clubs are collectively worth $36 billion and bring in over $6 billion in annual revenues.

Football ClubMarket Value ($M)Revenue ($M)
Barcelona$4,760$792
Real Madrid$4,750$792
Bayern Munich$4,220$703
Manchester United$4,200$643
Liverpool$4,100$619
Manchester City$4,000$609
Chelsea$3,200$520
Arsenal$2,800$430
PSG$2,500$599
Tottenham$2,300$494

Football clubs have witnessed more money being thrown into the game, partly because of the licensing and streaming deals behind the curtain. Big entities have entered the space like Amazon, Disney through ESPN, and DAZN, which has been regarded as the Netflix of sport.

From an audience standpoint, business interest in the sport is justified. In the last World Cup final, 517 million tuned in, compared to 160 million for the Super Bowl during the same year.

More Money in the Game

It’s not just the clubs that are seeing more money trickle down. Both fees for agents and player transfers have soared. From 2014 to 2019, agent fees grew from $241 (Read more...)

TravelPerk raises $160M in equity and debt after a year of derailed business trips

by Natasha Lomas

The pandemic has hammered the travel sector over the past 12 months so you’d be forgiven for feeling a bit of pre-COVID-19 déjà vu at this news: Business trip booking platform TravelPerk is announcing a $160M Series D.

The round, which is a mix of equity and debt funding, is led by London-based growth equity firm Greyhound Capital. Existing investors also participated (specifically: DST, Kinnevik, Target Global, Felix Capital, Spark Capital, Heartcore, LocalGlobe and Amplo).

No valuation is being disclosed, nor is the split between equity and debt. So it’s a bit more of a convoluted ‘vote of confidence’ vs TravelPerk’s pre-pandemic raises — as you’d expect given the locked down year we’ve all had.

The Series D means the 2015-founded Barcelona-based startup has pulled in a total of $294M to-date for its user-friendly retooling of business trip booking geared toward ‘global SMEs’, following a top-up of $60M (in 2019) to its 2018 $44M Series C — which itself fast-followed a $21M Series B that same year.

TravelPerk’s approach is akin to a consumerization play for the (non-enterprise end of) business trip booking, combining what it bills as “the world’s largest bookable travel inventory” — letting users compare, book and invoice trains, cars, flights, hotels and apartments from a range of providers including Kayak, Skyscanner, Expedia, Booking.com, and Airbnb — with tools for businesses to manage and report trips.

There’s the obligatory freemium tier for the smallest teams. It also offers 24/7 traveler support, a flexible booking option and (Read more...)