Finnish Government Backed Vigo Announces 5 New Accelerators And Results
A little over two and a half years ago, Finland saw a rise to a new kind of an accelerator program that would help early stage companies get further, faster. Back when it was first announced, the program was initially planned to be six years in length to be run in two three year cycles. Few of the goals set back then include raising €200 million in funding to the portfolio companies.
Today, the program announced five new accelerators as well as results from the first 32 months in existence. The program is a Finnish government supported initiative.
In addition to the five new accelerators, four accelerators remain from the original six. Back in July 2009, the program started with just three accelerators. The accelerators left are Cleantech Invest, KoppiCatch, Lifeline Ventures as well as Veturi Venture Accelerator.
Oh Private Money, Where Art Thou?
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Jaakko Salminen. More information on him towards the end of the post.
One of the generally accepted wisdoms of the Finnish startup and growth company environment is shortage of private money. Startups run to Tekes for funding supposedly due to lack of available private early investments, and growth companies get sold very early when there is no VC money available. Easily available public funding is often cited as the dragon eating away any lucrative investment opportunities, and the vicious circle is ready.
Or is private money simply being directed elsewhere? In fact some very interesting sources for additional private money could be made available, if we take a forward-looking attitude.
Preparing For A Financing Round
Editors note: “Road To Exit: Start-up’s First Year” is a practical blog series addressing the most common legal questions and problems that a startup company and its management faces during their first year of operation. The series is sponsored by Attorneys at Law Borenius Ltd.
So you have the company up and running and your team is working hard on the service/product. In most cases, you soon start looking for funding beyond the usual friends, family and fools department. Building up an investment ready company affects pretty much everything you do in your company. You build up networks, polish your website and pitch your idea in the social media and various real life events (luckily, plenty of such opportunities are nowadays available). Here are some insights to financing round preparations from the legal perspective.
Startups: Sign-up To Meet VCs After Arctic15
We're working hard to build all kinds of value into our conference we're organising in the autumn, Arctic15. One of these include a partnership with Helsinki based VC Zone. VC Zone Helsinki works together with venture capitalists and investors to find startups to invest in. We want to help in this naturally with our media reach.
Early Stage Investments For Politicians
Finland will have its parliamentary elections this spring, and Estonia just had theirs. I've come across quite a few candidates and politicians who don't fully understand the importance of early stage investments, call it angel investing or whatever you will, for the startup ecosystem and the economy itself. Some go even as far as stating, why should we give benefits to a certain group of business people and not everyone else? I've thought about this for a long time and I believe I've come across the most simple way to put the message across in a way that politicians would understand and respect the importance of it.
The Move Towards Supporting The Markets
Last week we covered how Finnish tax payers were forced to give publicly listed companies more than 40 million euros through Tekes. The argument from Tekes' side is that these larger companies are important drivers of innovation and projects. The President of Tekes Veli-Pekka Saarnivaara has stated that this year, growth companies were the focus of their financing. In 2010 Tekes approved more than 100 million euros in funding for younger companies, less than 6 years old. This is exactly the direction we should see the financing go - or even better, tie it completely to private funding.
TradeShift - Free Invoicing And Then Some
Back in March we covered TradeShift, at a time when there wasn't too much information on the company out yet. A few weeks ago, Wall Street Journal dug into the company and found out what they're really up to. The company publicly stated that they're building a free invoicing platform for companies, but while doing so - they're building a Unified Business Language, developers can build more apps on.
CapMan Restructures Investments, ie. Stops Investing
CapMan, the private equity investor in the Nordics and Russia, has announced last month that they will "restructure their investment operations" which in essence means they will stop investing. To be more precise, they will focus on their current portfolio companies and not raise any new funds nor do any new investments in the future.
VC Investment Criteria
In this series, supported by Nexit Ventures, we today take a look at investment criteria that venture capitalists use to grade startups. While these are sure to slightly differ from company to company, you'll be very well off understanding the implications and criteria Nexit Ventures uses to grade their potential investments. There are six points that investors usually look at and we'll take a look at each of these in detail. The criteria are management, market potential, exit potential, business model, technology and finance.
Siilasmaa: Direct Finnish Gov't Investments To Startups Should Be Stopped
Risto Siilasmaa, the F-Secure Chairman and Founder, one of the most well known private investors in Finland, has stated in a recent event that direct Finnish government investments to startups should be stopped. By this he means that the way they are currently done, should be stopped and we should leverage the wisdom in the market to make smarter investment decisions. His basic statement was that Finland has created the Vigo accelerator program which is full of serial entrepreneurs and the government investment funds should beinvested through these entities. He states that Finland should look towards Singapore and Israel, where the government leverages all private investments with certain restrictions.
Will 2010 Be The Decade Of The Mobile?
According to Nexit Ventures, the decade we're currently living, will be the decade of the mobile. Their research shows that every decade dating back to the 1960s can more or less be symbolised with a certain wave of technological development (and adoption for that matter). In the 1960s it was the mainframe computers, 1970s saw those getting smaller while 1980s to the mid 1990s was the decade of the personal computer and from there onwards we've seen the wave of desktop internet. According to Nexit's analysis 2010 onwards is strongly looking to be the decade of the mobile.
Applifier Is On Fire With "Substantial Revenue"
Reporting from the Mindtrek conference, I managed to have a chat with Jussi Laakkonen the CEO of Applifier about their service and what's been keeping them busy in the recent months. Only a little over a month ago we reported about the company reaching 55 million monthly active users (MAUs) within Facebook with their cross promotion network. Applifier is the successful (I think we can give it to them already easily) full company pivot from Everyplay, which used to be a 3D social game in Facebook.
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.
Cleantech Venture Capital 2009 Part One – The Big Trends
At Cleantech Scandinavia we have just finished our annual analysis of Nordic cleantech investments. It’s the third year we do this and it allows us to some observations over time so here we go!
First and foremost, the total amount of capital attracted by cleantech companies in the Nordics rose to EUR 460,6 million during 2009, compared to EUR 371,9 million in 2008.
This 24% growth rate was achieved primarily because of the increase in public funding activity, which doubled compared to 2008, but it also includes a 9% increase in amounts of private equity investments. At the same time, the number of transactions in 2009 was down 22% compared to the previous year. What this means is that amounts was up per investment and, as you might have guessed, expansion stage companies attracted most of the funding.
GrowVC Looking To Disrupt Global VC Business
GrowVC has slowly been marketing their concept in various social media networks and today is the date they're finally coming out with the concept and explaining it to the public. Back in December I had a chat with Valto Loikkanen, one of the co-founders of the company, and he told me the concept has been in finetuning for the last two years or so. They've put in a lot of effort to make sure their companies are registered and managed in the right way so that they are ready to scale once things start taking off.
The concept GrowVC is looking to disrupt is the age old venture capital business model. Many have complained that while business models in the online and mobile world have been turned upside down, one model remains loyal to the way business is done and that's the model of investing money into startups. Furthermore, the need for capital has gone down dramatically making smaller private investors more potential investors in startups than larger venture capitalists.
Investments And Acquisitions You Did Not Know About
I managed to get a fresh load of stories regarding the Finnish startup scene yesterday. While the companies themselves have not made too much noise about these, they are valid to break to keep the system as transparent as possible. There are 3 investment deals and one acquisition offer that was did not go down.
To begin with, we have Muxlim. The world's largest online network for Muslims. They have about 200 000 registered users at the moment. The story is that they have recently closed a round of financing from Europe, possibly UK. There is no word on the size of the round, nor who the investors are but this is what we're hearing from the street.
John Liljelund Of AW-Energy
I talked with John Liljelund, the CEO of AW-Energy in Lahti, Finland a few weeks ago in the Cleantech Venture Forum. He discussed various aspects in how the company was founded and where they are at the moment with their product. Not only is the story behind the company very interesting, but he goes through in detail the different stages of investment the company has received including his own march to become the CEO of the company. AW-Energy develops a product called Waveroller which harnesses energy from the energy of the waves.
AktieTwits.dk Trying To Unite Tweeting Nordic Stock Investors
AktieTwits.dk is a new Danish service for Nordic professional and private stock investors sharing investment tips or seeking stock information on Twitter. The idea is to bring all information flows together and structure the content, with the aim to ease real time monitoring of the market. AktieTwits is taking on the traditional message boards and media sites by aggregating real time instant messaging, to allow one feel "almost like standing on the tradingfloor," as the founder Jens Davidsen puts it.
The service is integrated with Twitter, meaning one can start participating in the AktieTwits community just by signing in to one's Twitter account. AktieTwits.dk uses own custom tags to catch users' Twitter tweets: "$$" for general market comments, and for example "$CARL-B", "$DANSKE" for comments on individual stocks. The site also shows all links to popular and related sites, including Youtube, Flickr, Jyskebank.TV, and own stock charts, as embedded content. In addition, AktieTwits offers also deeper information including stock quotes, charts, company data, and analyzing and screening tools for following the market on a daily basis. The website also has a good mobile version working with iPhone, Android, and Nokia Nseries handsets.
The service is not exactly a unique one, but could be successful if found useful by the local active investors. I would guess, though, that majority of them are focusing on home country trading with only partly attention to international markets, and thus also preferring to interact in their native language. Also, one might question selection of the domain name if indeed the service is targeted for pan-Scandinavian use. So far there are not that many features encouraging the community interaction either.
Anyway, there is for example a well-known Finnish investor magazine's online forum in which discussion on daily topics flows actively. Many of the comments are quite short, and could well be expressed instead in microblogging style in a service like AktieTwits. Considering you first need to begin and learn using Twitter is an additional hurdle in adoption, though.
Calibre One Reports Dip In Northern European Investments in Q2
Calibre One, an American corporation focusing on executive search has released an investments summary from the second quarter of 2009. In this summary, they outline the investment market to gradually bounce back in Northern America, while it slightly dips in Europe and cuts to about a quarter in Northern Europe. Their data is based on early level Tech investments and thus does not fully shed light into the whole market.
In Northern Europe, $56 million were invested in 9 deals in the second quarter according to Calibre One while the respective figures for Q1 were $219 million in 14 deals. The nine investments for Q2 in Northern Europe were Teklatech ($6,9M), Imbera ($15,7M), Aava Mobile ($4,1M), eZ Systems (undisclosed), Hexaformer ($4,5M), Tobii Technology ($22,2M), Swebo Bioenergy ($1,9M), Alternativ Media (undisclosed) and Accumulate (undisclosed). The country breakdown lists 5 investments to Sweden, 2 to Finland and one investment to both Denmark and Norway. While this is no way is the complete list of course, it might give sense as where we are with regards to the trend.
