Funding

All female founded StemSight is the first human stem cell startup from Finland to receive funding,  announcing a €500000 seed round from Voima Ventures. Stemsight aims to help over 12 million people suffer from corneal blindness regain their sight.   The all female-founded team, based in Tampere, has announced a new seed round from the DeepTech fund Voima Ventures and Avohoidan …

Pibox is a centralized/all-in-one remote collaboration solution developed for working with creative collaboration. It is used daily by the head of a production, music producers, managers and sound engineers. Now, Pibox has raised € 150,000 in funding from the Pitchdrive fund and several angel investors. Pibox was launched in 2018. The solution first raised interest among music producers, sound technicians …

Oslo-based SNÖ Ventures has launched its second fund to  invest in visionary Nordic entrepreneurs and connect the Nordics  with the US and broader Europe. The new fund targets $100M to invest  in early stage, high-growth Nordic tech companies with the potential to disrupt,  create or capture large markets through transformative technology or  solutions.  By Kremena Tosheva  SNÖ Ventures is led …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

Linear, a company focusing on the digitalization of real estate brokerage, has closed €1.1 million in seed funding.  The company, founded in 2018, offers an AI-driven  digital ecosystem to facilitate the housing trade. They will use the latest funding round on future growth and expansion to new markets. Linear offers realtors a comprehensive SaaS (Software as a Service) automation tool for …

All male founding teams still get 92.9% of external capital in the Nordics, to build and expand their startups. However, a new report from Unconventional Ventures shows us how a shift towards a more equal distribution of capital can be accelerated.  Unconventional Ventures is a Nordic early-stage investment firm that invest in scaleable tech startups at the pre-seed and seed …

The accelerator program Accelerate Estonia and Garage48 organized an online hackathon to develop solutions to help Estonia emerge from the coronavirus crisis and create competitive advantages for the post-crisis period. By Elis Tootsman The initiative, which has become the largest online hackathon in Estonia, was opened by President Kersti Kaljulaid and Minister of Foreign Trade and Information Technology Kaimar Karu. …

New report on Japanese Investments launched last week at Slush shows that when it comes to Japanese investments going in to the Nordic regions, Finland & Estonia is leading.  The report was made by Innovation Lab Asia, Nordic Ninja VC and Copenhagen Capacity. According to the report, since 2013, 22 of the 36 Japanese investments going into the Nordics has …

The Creandum funds won the “Venture Capital Fund of the Year” award at the 17th Investor Allstars event last night distinguished with the honors due to the outstanding performance over the previous year driven by exits from Spotify, iZettle, Small Giant Games, and Elastic. According to industry experts, the Creandum II fund is the best European institutional venture fund to …

Is your startup willing to be challenged by purchasers in the public administrations? If so, get in touch Innobrokers, an EU-funded project, aiming at facilitating the procurement of innovative goods and services by strengthening the links between public buyers on the demand side and innovative companies on the supply side. The project addresses startups and SMEs, organizations supporting innovation procurement …

This month, the first VC in the Nordics focusing purely on startups with a background in deeptech and science launched.  Headed by serial entrepreneur Inka Mero, Voima Ventures targeting a final closing of €50 million and has already announced commitments at €40 million. The fund’s press release states that their mission is to build a strong bridge between the scientific …

PINC is Paulig Group’s corporate venture capital unit. We sat down with the head of PINC, Marika King, for a Q&A to learn more about their investment thesis and how they’re shaping the future of taste. What is PINC? PINC stands for Paulig Incubator and is the innovation and venture arm for radical innovation within the Paulig Group. We were …

Accel raises a $575 million fund to back ambitious founders in Europe and Israel. The Nordics are a key market for this new fund.The Nordics will be a key market for investment Last week, Accel, a global VC firm, announced that it has raised a $575 million fund, its sixth to be invested in early stage companies across Europe and …

Serial entrepreneur Inka Mero launches Voima Ventures, the first VC fund in the Nordics with a focus purely on startups with deep tech and science background The first VC in the Nordics focusing purely on startups with deep tech and science background was launched officially today. Voima Ventures’ cornerstone investors are VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and European Investment …

NordicNinja VC by JB Nordic Ventures has officially launched its new €100M VC fund in partnership with Panasonic, Honda, Omron, and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC). The fund will help Nordic and Baltic scale-up companies enter the technology business ecosystem in Japan and across Asia. “Today, the Nordic startup ecosystem and Japanese blue-chip companies represent something of a …

BaltCap, together with JBIC IG Partners, a Japanese government backed private equity and venture capital firm, is establishing a new €100m fund focusing on venture capital investments in the field of industrial technology in the Nordic and Baltic region. The fund was announced at Slush 2018 and is launching this year. JB Nordic Ventures is a 50/50 joint venture between BaltCap,  …

The founders behind Sweden’s Included.Works, the platform that helps companies with recruiting through crowdsourcing, have developed a new service: ProgressData.io. The service makes it possible for companies to keep track of diversity within their company and give insight into how they can develop it. “We started addressing the problem with homogenous companies with our recruiting service Included.Works, which gives a …