Microtask Closes A Super Seed Round From Sunstone Capital
Microtask, a Finnish startup, has just closed a round of seed financing lead by Danish Sunstone Capital followed by a group of Angel investors (see list below). The size of the round is undisclosed, but the company told us that they should be able to get to summer 2011 with it. The round is their second seed round and it's structured as more and more financing rounds nowadays are: It's a seed round that's lead by a VC who has also committed to lead the A round next spring. Why do a VC come in so early in with a group of Angels? Because they want to make sure the Super Angels with minifunds are not eating their lunch, that's why. Even though Microtask news is positive and there exists hardly any threatening Super Angels in the Nordics, there is a lot of debate and tension about the general phenomena elsewhere. These tensions seem to be especially true in the US, where there's more investors battling for the best deals.
Government Backed Accelerators Chosen - March On Finland!
Vigo, a Finnish government run program to strengthen the currently rather dismal foundation of Finnish risk capital ecosystem and to create international venture accelerators and investors in Finland (see our previous story here), has come to an end and now it's time to see what we got. And it does not look that bad at all.
In total, three venture accelerators where chosen by the steering board, which was lead by Mr. Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman, founder and former Chief Executive Officer of F-Secure Corporation, Member of the Board at Nokia and a prominent business angel among other things. It seems that the Vigo steering board was looking into finding teams to cover various different industries and compliment each other instead of creating competition into the Finnish venture capital scene. They seems to have found three such 'mutually exclusive' teams to fit the bill, namely Lifeline Ventures, Lots and Veturi Venture Accelerator. Here's a short description of each in turn.
