European VC investment in Web 2.0 grows in 2006

Paul Fisher has an excellent round-up of European seed and first rounds of VC investment from 2006. He reveals that more then £144 million was raised by 54 European Web 2.0 companies last year.

In his post, Paul points out the rapid growth in investment levels - in 2005, just £24 million was invested into Web 2.0 companies. That figure rose to £79 million in 2006.  

The top ten investments were:

1. Wiggle - a sports retail site. £12 million invested by Isis.
   
2. Fon - a Spanish wifi sharing site. £12.33 million invested by Sequoia , Google and Index.
   
3. Viagogo - an online ticket exchange. £9.9 million invested by Index ventures and Atomico.
   
4. Aggregator - a web TV service. £9 million invested by Amadeus , Intel Capital and 3i.
   
5. Igglo - a Finnish real estate site. £8.51 million invested by Benchmark and Taivas.
   
6. Bebo - the social network. £8.5 million invested by Benchmark Capital.
   
7. Netvibes - a news aggregator. £8.17 million invested by Index Ventures and Accel Partners.
   
8. WAYN - a travel social network. £5.5 million invested by Esprit and angels.
   
9. WazUp -  an email service. £5.2 million invested by Innovacom & Wellington Partners.
   
10. Dailymotion - a video sharing site. £4.77 million invested by Atlas Venture and Partech.

Index Ventures was the most active of the VCs in 2006, and Paul points out that a couple of trends, such as companies using third party web services as a platform, as with autoquake and auctioning4u, both of which help people sell on eBay.

For Paul's post, visit The coffee shops of Mayfair .
For a look at VC spending in the US, check out Read/WriteWeb