Veraventure Becomes More Transparent Regarding Investments
Veraventure, the government owned venture capital company that works with early stage Finnish companies, has recently become more transparent regarding its investment activities. This is a very good sign and should be carefully noted by venture capitalists and other seed investors not already doing so. With the renewal of Veraventure's new website, one is now able to go through all the investments Veraventure has made.
Transparency was one of the key issues in our coverage regarding the Vigo accelerator program and I'm excited to see Veraventure being open in this way. Another point that I remember being raised in Mindtrek 2009 was a question for Veraventure why they haven't done a lot of investments into the area of web services. Looking at the list of companies they have invested in, there are quite a few of those there.
Not only is it important with government owned companies to have this kind of transparency, but I'd really love to see this spread to other venture capitalists who don't show their investments this openly. While there are a few cases when being open about your investments isn't smart, but usually there are no reasons not to show the companies one has invested in. Why? The simple spillover effect, that startups are more talked about and also the investments themselves. We really need more transparency and talk about startups here in the Nordics and Baltics.
A tip for Vera: It would help to scan the list for interesting companies, if a category or a one sentence description of each would be shown.
I completely agree, seeing logos is better than just a name, but industry sector and short summary would help a lot.
Despite the obvious challenges, I hope that my proposal of building one truly multiple-use & open Finnish start-up DB takes off. The idea has been circulated with Ville / ArcticStratup, Hannu / Avera, Jens / AES and Jaakko / Finnish SW Entrepreneurs.
Main idea would be to allow each organization (Tekes, Vigos, Spinno, AES, etc.) to have a list of affiliated start-ups and high-tech companies on their web site (a plug-in, API to DB, a piece of html code...) and each start-up would update their data and decide what information they want to publish of themselves. Validation would be wikipedia-type and rely on different organizations and their motive to keep the DB clean.
We have too many small lists and databases. Rather than improving Spinno's current static web page, I would develop one DB jointly to market Finnish start-ups.
I don't have a ready answer, who owns the DB and how its development would be funded - Tekes, TEM or a foundation with different stakeholders. All these sound very sloooow options.
ArcticIndex and TP Online are possible platforms. I think that since my change of position from Technopolis Ventures to Spinno, TPO has been proposed to be funded by Tekes and/or TEM to be an open platform, but with quite a high price tag on it (anecdotal information while tossing around with the idea with different stakeholders).
Let's see. In the meanwhile, we just have to cope with the lists that we have.
Thanks for a very good article, and kudos to Vera for starting the climb to a transparent ecosystem. I also agree with the categorization comments - in some ways that is the critical element.
I don’t want to get into the mechanics of (at least what used to be) a confidential discussion on pricing, but just a word on TechnopolisOnline, and the perception of whether it is expensive or not, and whether it is or will be publicly funded or not.
If there is the perception that it is expensive, your sources should carefully look at what is inside the package. I.e. full access to Ovum and Datamonitor, and other useful live feeds from various data services. As an example, just in the last day one startup (actually a Vera investment) downloaded many 10s of thousands of euro’s worth of market research.
We will do whatever it takes to open up the market and increase the transparency hence transform Finland into a REAL marketplace for international investors. Thus far we have managed to get tens of foreign VCs to scan the Finnish market every week through Technopolis Online. And we haven't even started:)