Nordic Startup News Early Stage Startup News From The Nordics

The Copenhagen-based Nordic accelerator Urbantech Program, hosted by BloxHub, has announced the 10 most promising and innovative sustainable technology startups for their 2021 batch. This announcement comes after a global search for urbantech startups. According to the UN, up to 70 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050. This creates major challenges and calls …

Civinity, one of the largest facility management and engineering groups in the Baltic states, has announced the launch of their new investment management firm called Pentaframe Capital. Pentaframe Capital plans to invest up to €15 million across the following five years, with focus on real estate, facility management, and smart city tech startups across Europe. By Rūta Lapinskienė  Pentaframe Capital plans …

The Finnish commerce experience scale-up Nosto has aquired Stackla, a visual content marketing platform for user-generated content. The acquisition is Nostos first acquisition and marks their entrance into the Australian and Southeast Asian markets.  By Uday Radia AI-powered personalized shopping Nosto, a Finnish commerce experience scale-up which helps retailers deliver personalized digital shopping experiences, has acquired Stackla, a global visual …

According to reports from, European Capital,  Danske Bank and i5invest, European VC and PE funds have been substantially gaining ground despite Covid-19, and a substantial margin in the Nordics are focusing on investments in energy and sustainability. Norway, Denmark, and Lithuania have a particularly strong focus on investments in these areas in 2021 compared to the rest of Europe, and …

Latvia’s Nordigen has announced a new €2.1 million investment to expand their freemium model after growing to support more than 1000 European bank APIs.  Investors include Black Pearls VC, Inventure, Highgoal Capital, ID4 Ventures, Calchas Holding and angel investors from across the Baltics including Artis Kehris, Henry Nilert, Gerri Kodres and Riivo Anton. The startup is challenging Tink and other …

The technology startup UP Catalyst, founded in 2019, received €50 000 of seed money from the 2021 ESA BIC (Business Incubation Centre) programme for business and product development to boost their novel way of oxygen production on Mars. In addition to the funding UP Catalyst receives technical support from the European Space Agency and hands on mentoring from the field …

Summer of 2021 is closing in, and as the world is seeing a surge in optimism with the influx of vaccines, Kiuas, the #1 startup accelerator in Finland, brings exciting news about expansion. Kiuas today revolves around the startup accelerator programs, and with the changing world, it makes to evolve the flagship program, Kiuas Accelerator, to the next level as …

According to a report by Money UK, Denmark is the second best-funded nation for startup businesses after the US.  With a total of five new business grants offering over $1,000,000, Denmark only lags slightly behind top funding opportunities in the US. The report, which is based on data from the Innovation Investment Index, highlights Denmark as an innovative hubspot leading …

Getting through the Nordic winter is trying at the best of times. The previous months have provided few hours of sunshine but an infinite amount of “recommendations” (it is to date not legal for the Swedish government to e.g. enforce a lockdown) formulated in almost as many ways as there are media outlets. The Nordics are the societies in the …

Danish customer support innovator Dixa has acquired Melbourne-based knowledge management platform Elevio in a circa US$15m deal. The acquisition supports Dixa’s long term vision to simplify more aspects of customer service through personalization and machine learning. Dixa’s platform is used by consumer-facing brands to serve customers across multiple channels from a single screen including social media, chat, voice and messaging apps, …

Avokaado, a contract lifecycle management platform (CLM) from Estonia, announces a €700K pre-seed round, including Hong Kong’s ParticleX as a strategic investor. Avokaado was founded by legal tech innovator Mariana Hagström in 2016, after experiencing significant inefficiencies in service delivery during her extensive career as an attorney-at-law and managing partner at a law firm. What initially started out as a …

Home to the first Bitcoin lottery and other blockchain-powered online games, the Northern European region is no stranger to the iGaming industry. In recent years, the Nordic countries have become some of the most successful in the entire European gaming industry. So, let’s take a closer look at the Nordic iGaming market today and how it might fare in the coming …

Since launching its report on who funds whom in the Nordics, together with partners like Startup Sweden and NVCA, the team at Unconventional Ventures have been busy. They recently launched the UV Syndicate, giving everyone the opportunity to co-invest in, by UV vetted, startups at pre-seed and seed stages. Today they announce the first digital accelerator targeting underrepresented founders based …

Mbegu Solar AB was founded in 2020 and its team is based in Stockholm, Lund and Nairobi. They bring solar products in a completely new format to the East African market and target micro-entrepreneurs as opposed to the end consumer. Solar products are already widely available all over the world for off grid electricity, but Mbegu Solar states this is …

You’ve heard of hygge. If you’re a Scandinavia enthusiast, you may even have heard of friluftsliv. But are you ready for the lifestyle trend that’s so quintessentially Northern that the people who invented it don’t even have a catchy term for it, much like fish presumably don’t have a word for water? It’s the Estonian phenomenon of “just sort of getting on …

Statistics show we have collectively stigmatized randomly phoning someone up and as a result, over the past decade, the number of texts sent monthly have increased with 7,700% and US smartphones users allegedly receive and respond to 5x more texts than phone calls. We have built handheld walls against direct interactions at the same time as social platforms have moved …

Garden Eight is a multi-award-winning digital production team from Japan specialising in visual design, web design and web development. Founded in Asakusabashi, Tokyo in 2011, the studio has just opened their European headquarters in Copenhagen. The Nordics are known as the world’s “unicorn factory” per capita outside of Silicon Valley and have enjoyed a spotlight on their technologies from one …

Finnish startup Flowrite, building an AI-powered writing tool on OpenAI’s GPT-3, has closed a pre-seed funding round of €550,000 from Europe’s leading early-stage investors Lifeline Ventures and Seedcamp, joined by angel investors including Unity founder David Helgason. Flowrite is among the first companies globally to launch and raise funding for a product built on top of OpenAI’s language model GPT-3. …

As in many countries during the pandemic, contactless payments have been on the rise in Lithuana.   The country has chosen to make Fintech a national priority and has updated the process for business licensing for Fintech companies. By Lukas Pereckas “The whole Fintech ecosystem here is so developed – business support networks, clear efficient regulation, lawyers who know the field …

A small nation of fewer than 2 million people, Latvia is one of Europe’s entrepreneurial hotspots. There are several advantages that ensure that Latvia is a great place for startups starting from a multilingual workforce, affordable costs for operations, a high standard of living, and government support. Latvia has a booming startup ecosystem and a high number of ingenious up-and-comers …