Northzone Ventures announced the first close of € 90 million of a new fund, Northzone VI. Targeting € 150 million, the fund will invest in fast growing Euro tech companies. Prominent Nordic and International institutional investors participated in the first close.
This was not only significant because we certainly don’t have too much venture capital in the Nordics, but also because this will mean that some of the better venture capital firms are bullish enough to look outside for new investments instead of just trying help navigate their current portfolio companies through the rough economy. I’m happy that the Finnish Industry Investment, whose Advisory Council I sit at, invested a total of € 7.5m in the new fund (consider this as my disclosure). This shows that the institutional players believe in the asset class despite the lack of an IPO market. I agree that I might read this news as a bigger positive sign than most, given how bad the European let alone Nordic venture capital situation is, but what it highlights is that the best startups will always find the money when they need it regardless of geography or economy. For the real pirates now is always the right time to start a company.
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Magnifier is a new Finnish startup accelerator fund investing money and effort at a pre-seed phase into new promising startups with world-class opportunity. The purpose of Magnifier is to prepare and scale the firms for the next stage where angels and early VCs can and want to invest into them.
The fund was founded by a group of ten young but experienced entrepreneurs. The founders are driven by the urge to share their experiences and learnings to other Finnish startups. Also foreign entrepreneurs are welcomed, though, as long as the firm is located in Finland. The leading idea is to help accelerate their growth and avoid the pitfalls the founders may have experienced in the past, and thus cultivate the Finnish startup culture.
The track record of the founders is quite impressive. They state having founded over 30 firms, raised over 35 million euros of venture capital, and been involved in over 25 mergers and acquisitions altogether.
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I had the pleasure of meeting with Janne Känkänen from the Finnish Ministry of Employment and Economy, the operational primus motor behind the Vigo startup accelerator programme that the Finnish government has been putting together in the recent months. I for one am very suspicious of where the government wants to take the growth entrepreneurship as an ecosystem, but was very glad to find out that there has been plenty of productive progress happening behind the scenes.
The Vigo, startup accelerator, that we wrote about earlier (but did not know the name back then) is only one concrete realisation of this new programme and its results. Mr Känkänen also told us that growth entrepreneurship ecosystem has been understood to require special methods of assistance and the current economic climate has further sped up those requirements.
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Finland’s Minister of employment and the economy, Mauri Pekkarinen, has announced last week that Finland will be adding more capability to commercialise innovations with a €45 million fund. The fund is put together from governmental organisations such as Tekes and Finnvera’s seed financier Vera.
The aim of the new fund is to attract more international talent from overseas to help the companies grow and also enable more targeted investments. One of the ways international talent is attracted is the financial upside. The goverment is willing to invest into these companies, if a private sector individual (person or organisation) invests. Thus the financial upside is the invested amount in the company.
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TechCrunch has the story that Nokia has just added $150M to Nokia Growth Partners fund. The total capital in the fund is at the moment around $250 million. Some of the companies the fund has invested into in the past that have made it are BitBoys (sold for $44M), Global Locate ($143M) and Coding Technologies ($250M).
The focus of the investments, according to TechCrunch, are now in China and India. Not a bad strategy as Nokia hasn’t been all that strong in the US, where the iPhone is reaping success.
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