The COVID-19 outbreak is hard on all companies, but especially startups. To raise awareness of the situation startups find themselves in, the Hub/Danske Bank asked startups across the Nordics to share the challenges the COVID-19 outbreak has brought with it.

The aim of this survey is to map out the most pressing issues facing Nordic startups and to help us understand their current situation. The results of the survey will be shared publicly and with relevant decision makers to raise awareness of the current challenges startups face as a result of the pandemic crisis.

The COVID-19 Startup Survey was published on the 18th March 2020, 12:00 and is still open for more responses

We have used survey questions made by the Startup Sweden for ease of comparison. Their survey focuses on Swedish startups, while we have targeted startups in the other countries where the Hub is present, namely Denmark, Finland, Norway and Northern Ireland.

The below is a representation of the situation of the first 468 responding startups. The results will be updated on a regular basis as long as relevant.

Looking at the numbers, the pattern is clear: The existence of the majority of Nordic startups is uncertain as a direct result of COVID-19.

There are especially three different areas where the startups expect challenges when elaborating on which negative ways they will be affected by the current situation.

First and foremost, 81% of startups will lose income as a result of a decrease in sales. Second, 54% of startups will have difficulties with keeping their employees on payroll and more than half will have issues with their current or future funding round.

When asked which challenge is the most pressing issue, it’s clear to see that the income of startups is a concern.

69% of startups already see or expect a loss of income due to a decrease in sales due to COVID-19. Remarkably, only 6% find that paying taxes and governmental fees are their most pressing issue.

COVID-19 has a clear impact on the job of many startup employees. While 63% of startups don’t plan to reduce their workforce right now, 37% are already making plans to change their current workforce setup.

Our survey has gathered responses from startups of all kinds; a great range of startup sizes, industries and locations have been represented so far and we still expect more data to roll in.

47% of the startups have 1-4 employees on their payroll while the following 40% represents the number of paid employees ranging from 5-20. These numbers are very typical for startups as capital usually is scarce all depending on factors such as funding.

When asking about what stages the startups are currently situated in, we can see that most startups are in seed-stage (35%) with self-funded startups (21%) and pre-seed startups (17%) are coming in second and third. A/B/C-round startups consist of 16% while only 11% are not currently looking for funding.

The majority of these responses are coming from Nordic startups in Denmark (67%). Secondly, a great number of startups are coming from Finland and Norway with 17% each. Startups from Northern Ireland (1%) are also represented, but as a minority in this survey. So be aware that currently there is a country bias in the results.

Keep in mind the survey only has been running since Wednesday 18th March and that we are still collecting responses as of this moment. We hope to include data from Sweden in the coming days.

Bootstrapping publishes this article with permission from the hub / Danske Bank. For further information please look here.