Denmark

Denmark is riding on a green wave.  The country has been lauded for its focus on sustainable energy, recycling, and high quality of life.   The Danish startup Miljøskærm,  based at the science park at Scion DTU, uses all these values to make its defense against traffic noise – the company builds barriers out of old windmills. The Danish startup …

It started as a university project to ensure that the creators could get a ticket to the Roskilde Festival.  But after four yeas of development on a hobby basis at the festival, the project has now become a living.  Meet Peefence, the startup that makes mobile urinals. The Roskilde Festival is a large annual music festival in Denmark that is …

Sustainability is more than an environmental concept – it’s big business too.  At the Impact Investor Ball last week, several startups pitched their products for a more sustainable future.  Lean Green was one of them.  The company has developed a festival chair in biodegradable and recyclable cardboard. The chair has been a hit at Roskilde Festival, the annual music festival …

$6-7000 per position, 12 weeks, and a one in ten ‘bad hire’ rate: these are the potential pitfalls awaiting the recruiter according to RelinkLabs. Founded in 2013, the Copenhagen-based company are launching a new API to streamline the recruitment process. The first of its kind, it will generate insights based on proprietary data products to help match profiles against job …

Design and creativity took free rein at the Maker area at this year’s Roskilde festival, where on Tuesday night makers competed to created the silliest robots. An arsenal of glue guns and soldering irons were snatched up by festival guests Tuesday, who were invited to join in building silly and fun robots.  The building culminated in a tournament on Tuesday …

Realm has taken home the prestigious ‘Startup of the Year’ at the Nordic Startup Awards 2016.  This is no surprise if you have followed the company’s explosive growth over the last 2 years.  Realm has created a mobile database for developers globally to create advanced applications quickly and easily, and is now in the hands of 1 billion users. The …

The Nordic Startup Awards grand finale took place in the Harpa Center in Reykjavik, Iceland, and hosted collaboration with Icelandic Startups.  Attendees from all over the Nordics gathered to celebrate the best startups, accelerators, and investors of the year. Kim Balle, founder of the Nordic Startup Awards, spoke about why the awards are so important for the startup ecosystem. “We …

Peak, the successful UK-based brain training app, backed in part by Creandum, has launched in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden with localised versions to the native languages of each country. Peak is the app that trains your cognitive function with challenging and fun games, exercising skills such as memory, focus, attention, problem solving, and mental agility. They also offer non-traditional games …

The story of Tradeshift has become somewhat legendary in Nordic entrepreneurial circles. The company was “founded on Twitter”, after one of Tradeshift’s founders Christian Lanng responded to a tweet by serial entrepreneur Morten Lund asking about interesting work being done to make government more efficient. Lang tweeted back about some of the projects he was doing with his colleagues Mikkel …

When you surf the internet, different companies gather your data in the form of so-called cookies, which are used to, for example, tailor advertising.  Now, the Danish ISP Waoo has developed a new plugin that allows you to donate your data to charity. On the internet, your data is used daily by companies, who are interested to find out how …

The semi-finals of the Nordic Startup Awards are now finished. This series of events promotes and celebrates startups in the Nordic region.  Country winners are chosen for each country, and the finalists move upwards to a grand ceremony held in Iceland at the end of May. Winners in Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have been announced in regional ceremonies …

The InnoFrugal Conference acts as a forum for best practices, policy analysis, sharing the latest thinking and highlighting success in frugal innovation. The second annual InnoFrugal event was held last week at Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre in Vantaa, a few minutes north of Helsinki. Co-organised by the non-profit Nordic Frugal Innovation Society and the Ministry For Foreign affairs Finland, …

COCOA Invest founders Omar Shaikh and Lars Buur think the Nordics are often overlooked and under-served when it comes to personal finance. A London native, Omar sought to bring some of his expertise from his homelands financial sector to the Nordics.  He began collaborating with Lars, who was based in Denmark, and COCOA Invest was born. While they were both …

The world-renowned startup and technology event Slush is set to occur for it’s ninth run in Helsinki, Finland on November 30 and December, 2016.  Register now to join the biggest startup conference in the Nordics and one of the most exciting startup events worldwide. “Our focus is on creating an event that brings the highest value to the startups. We …

The Danish electronic invoicing startup Sproom has been acquired by Visma. The acquisition is part of Visma’s strategy to become the Nordic leader in e-invoicing. Sproom is a digital trading platform that automates and optimizes difficult and tedious billing work – the work that bigger companies have full-time employees to perform and that small business often lack the resources to …

Lemonsqueeze helps European startups scale into the US market from their offices in Brooklyn.  Now, the company will be expanding internationally themselves – back to founder Mik Strøyberg’s home country, Denmark, and much more.  For the first time, local startups will have access to Lemonsqueeze’s specialized knowledge in reaching outside of their home market. While the Nordics are one of …

Reshopper helps families to recycle items such as clothes through their platform, which joins local buyers and sellers.  Now, former AirBnB manager Aja Guldhammer Henderson has joined Reshopper to help them flourish abroad. For last four years, 31-year-old Aja Guldhammer Henderson has been a key figure behind the sharing economy-success of AirBNB in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.  She has now …

Want to help shape the future of green cities and create sustainable solutions to climate challenges on a regional level? Join the Nordic Cities Workshop, held in Malmö, Sweden from the 28-29th of April, 2016. Climate-KIC works to create consistency between private, public, and academic initiatives on climate change. Their goal is to find solutions to environmental challenges through cooperation …

InfoShare 2016 is the biggest tech and new media conference in the entire Central and Eastern European region. For the 10th year in a row, the event will take place in Gdansk, Poland, from 18-20 May at the Amber Expo, the biggest expo center in Tricity. This  event brings in over 5,000 worldwide participants and 100 speakers spanning the entire …

The Danish startup Planday has closed a $14 million (DKK 93 million) investment lead by the  Indinvest and Sweden’s Creandum. The investment will be used to strengthen Planday’s growth in the US and UK – and build more presence in the European market. Planday has developed an online roster planning system for all types of businesses who use a flexible …