It's High Time There Was A Tech IPO Market In London

The recent results of Zygna, Groupon, and even the mighty Facebook on the public markets in the U.S. have served to highlight a couple of major issues for European startups. One is a little jealously: there remain few viable IPO markets in Europe for tech stocks, hence why you see so many moving to the US – taking everything into consideration NASDAQ – when they get big, as happened with Yandex and Qlik Technologies. The second is annoyance: many solid European tech companies are now at a point where they have solid, revenue generating businesses, built on a lot more than hype and user numbers alone. And in the last year we’ve seen these companies start to look for ways to break-out.

Index notes the “steady transformation” of real estate tenants in London’s business districts towards innovation companies just as Bloomberg, Skype, Amazon, Expedia, and newer ones just as Moo.com, Moshi Monsters, Huddle and others. Some companies in the tech sector are seeing revenue growth of anyway 30% per annum, and up to 100%.

Further more, its just plain stupid. The UK's Internet economy now accounts of over 8% of the country’s GDP, a higher figures than South Korea, China, Japan or the US according to the Economist Intelligence Unit and OECD.

Strategic investments by city firms are needed to build up specialist analysis and the technology required to properly evaluate hyper-growth tech companies and become familiar with the diverse business models and KPIs.

The charge here

Dow Jones VentureSource released figures about European venture capital which show that consumer Internet companies are now leading the charge here. Nevertheless the trends as well show that European tech companies are suffering from too few exit and IPO opportunities.

Because it’s evidently going to take more than a few networking events among city traders and startups to get this going.

Index Ventures is a leading venture capital firm specializing in investments in information innovation and life sciences companies. The firm invests in seed, early and growth stage start-ups across US and Europe.Since its inception in 1996, Index Ventures has backed visionary entrepreneurs who have taken on incumbents and built seminal companies in a number of growth sectors including: open source software companies just as MySQL, Trolltech, Zend and Pentaho; broadband and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) companies just as Virata, Skype, FON and...