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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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.
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Just recently Mårten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, joined Index Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence. He also serves in a similar position with Benchmark Capital in US. We of course welcome this as a positive news for the European entrepreneurship. But just a little earlier in January Fred Destin and the whole Atlas Ventures packed up and moved to Boston, leaving just enough staff to support to current European investments.
What is going on in Europe? Are we going to see the existing VC model literally disappear? Just last week I came back from DLD conference in Munich, Germany where I talked numerous people influential in the industry from Israel, London, New York and Zurich about the situation on the ground and most concurred that what we used to know as A-round-sized-VC-firms are becoming fewer and fewer. The smart ones are either going towards smaller deals and much more hands-on model or gravitating towards private equity sized funds (not least because of the hefty management fees) …well, or moving to Boston.
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Finnish VC Inventure has invested 2 million USD into Finnish mobile publishing platform firm Conmio. The financing will be used to support Conmio’s international growth and product development. Conmio sees many opportunities for expansion due to the strong demand for mobile services. Conmio’s target customers include media firms, device manufacturers and other companies interested in providing mobile solutions to their customers or end users.
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For those who have not found this resource yet, I’d like to turn your attention to the wonderful list compiled by Larry Cheng on international Venture Capitalists who blog. He has compiled a list of the top international VC bloggers. The figures are interesting as the lists are created by average monthly uniques. On top of the list is not suprisingly, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures with about 100 000 uniques a month visiting his blog.
Larry has also compiled the RSS feeds of the bloggers into Google Reader bundles/OPML files that help faster subscriptions to the blogs.
Here’s the link to Global Venture Capital Blog Directory
Photo by Kris Taeleman
Daniel Blomquist of Creandum, a Swedish early stage venture capital company, has posted an excellent post to their blog analysing the differences between the Nordic countries to other countries as well as analysing the differences within themselves. In essence, Daniel goes on to confirm what Will Cardwell said some time ago.
Creandum has gathered a lot of knowledge about the Nordic venture capital market over the last two years to understand the ecosystem better and thus be able to work in it better. They now share some of this knowledge with us. Their main findings from the report were:
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The Nordics and Baltics are still very much a wild west when it comes to venture capital and building startups into real growth companies and all the way to the IPO dreamland.
All the countries have their peculiar histories when it comes to VC landscape and so does Finland. Will Cardwell, the CEO of Techopolis Ventures, wrote a very enlightening post called “Reeling in the last decade in Finnish VC” (here) on how the scene has developed in Finland what factors have influenced it.
Will starts out by saying that while there certainly are a lot of colorful stories, the thing that bothers him is the number of “success stories that got away. When assessing history track record he goes on to say that he emphasizes exits, since they are the only relevant measure of success for both growth entrepreneurial businesses or venture capital investing, and this area (exits) is precisely where Finnish companies have had the biggest challenges Cardwell’s view. By looking at the figures one can’t but agree.
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There’s been a lot of talk lately about angel investing or the lack of thereof, and I think the time is finally ripe for it to raise its head here in the Nordics and Baltics.
I just recently talked to Petteri Koponen of Lifeline Ventures, who came back from the first SeedSummit that took place in London and was put together by the good people at Seedcamp. It’s a new initiative that twice a year brings together a critical mass of Europe’s most active seed investors to try and establish a stronger, more cohesive network to support entrepreneurs across the continent.
We welcome the initiative. If its needed generally in Europe, the Nordics and Baltics are literally screaming for such an initiative.
The other angel investor coming from our neck of the woods who was present was who else than the other Jaiku co-founder, Jyri Engeström. Other angels present included Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman, Lukasz Gadowski, Stefan Glaenzer, Dave McClure, Andy Philips, William Reeve, Robin Klein and Sherry Coutu. A hefty list.
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Today The Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association issued a press release (here in Finnish) demanding tax exemption for Finnish startups. Jaakko Salminen, head of the Association, argues that the current Finnish tax legislation is not fair for startups in comparison to the BigCo. To fix this the Association proposes that those startups that fund their operations from their own profits and are owned by the entrepreneurs themselves should be exempted from the corporate income tax. This of course means that those startups are profitable. Further, the tax legislation should promote all the measures that lead to M&A activity that increases the size of the company. The Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association also go on to argue that such measures push up the employment figures and increase the tax revenue in the long run.
Currently the heaviest burden from the Finnish taxation is felt by the early stage startups that don’t use debt leverage as much as BigCo, are owned by the entrepreneurs themselves and fund their day to day straight from the accrued revenues. Salminen goes on to argue that being exempted from corporate income tax would incentivise exactly these types of companies to leave the money in the company to fuel the growth, instead of taking out every last penny through dividends.
We concur, but can’t see how this helps the pre-revenue stage companies that are not profitable, which is the type of startup where the need for tax, or any break, is the biggest. Profitable and promising startups should not have trouble getting investors interested in the. Conversely, even the promising, but riskier pre-revenue ones do.
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Guest post by Andy Cars, CEO of Seedcap. Andy evaluates hundreds of business ideas each year giving him an in-depth understanding of what it takes to succeed in a global market.
Seedcap AB help entrepreneurs and start-ups to raise capital. Here’s Andy’s 10 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Often Make When Raising Capital.
1. Trying to raise money too late
Raising money is time consuming. Count with an absolute minimum of 3 months, with a more likely scenario being 5 – 7 months.
2. Trying to raise money too early
There should be a logical relationship between the perceived value of the company in need of cash and the amount of cash to be raised. Trying to raise significant sums simply based on an idea usually fails, which leads us to point 3 below:
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Nikolaj Nyholm, a Danish serial entrepreneur, who stepped down as Polar Rose’s CEO just recently will join a Nordic venture capital firm Sunstone Capital as Partner in the Technology Ventures team on January 1.
Nyholm has spent the last 10 years working with internet infrastructure projects, commercial ventures and organizing, among other things, Reboot with Thomas Madsen-Mygdal. He has previously founded Speednames/Ascio acquired by Group NBT (NBT.NL), Imity merged with Zyb (acquired by Vodaphone Group), and Organic Network, a WiFi startup whose legacy is OpenWRT.org, an open source WiFi project.
Without a doubt this is good move by Sunstone Capital as Nyholm has an extremely wide network and is considered one of the most visionary entrepreneurs in the space. Quite naturally, at Sunstone Nyholm will focus on developing early-stage investments in the software, mobile and an internet space. Commenting his move, Nyholm said that ” There aren’t enough seasoned entrepreneurs joining VC firms in Europe, which should otherwise allow us to stir things up a whole lot more! ” We couldn’t agree more.
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During our trip to the Silicon Valley we aimed to meet people who have experience from the Northern Europe on one hand, and from the Silicon Valley on the other to get the bottom of the differences between the two places .
Especially we wanted to know what their advice would be for the aspiring young startups that try to figure out whether it’s worth to relocate to the Silicon Valley from Nordic or Baltic countries, or whether the whole Silicon Valley hype is just hot air and Northern Europe is just as good a location to build a startup as any.
Here Mia Lewin, a Finn, a former VC and an entrepreneur, talks about the differences between VC firms between Europe and the Silicon Valley, how to figure out where to locate and how Mia herself plans to build her startup and raise funding. See the video below.
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Via Venture Partners, a Nordic venture fund, is to invest € 2.65 million in
Swedish mobile marketing company PlusFourSix. PlusFourSix offers the mobile telephone as a marketing tool, making it possible for clients to create a mobile initiative for their marketing, without having to invest in expensive infrastructure.
According to Niklas Stålberg, the new PlusFourSix CEO as of 1 August, the money is raised to speed the company’s expansion in Sweden and across the Nordics.
Anders Lindqvist, Partner in Via Venture, has been appointed as Chairman of the Board and Mattias Danielsson has joined the Board of Directors. Mr. Lindqvist says that mobile marketing is one of the fastest growing media channels with an estimated annual global growth rate of over 40 percent. We agree with cautiously, as its much easier to loose brand equity with badly designed marketing than gain paying customers. Regardless, PlusFourSix is the leading supplier of mobile marketing technology and solutions in the Nordic region.
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A new report by Technopolis Online, a for-pay information tool for all high-tech financing activities in Finland, states that Finnish high-tech growth companies raised almost €51 million in the first half of 2009, which is a 17% decrease from the first half of 2008. In addition, Q2 2009 decreased more than 50% compared to the prior year.
Let’s break down some of these figures. To put things in perspective the €51 million was raised by total of 29 Finnish high-tech companies from both, venture capital and angel investors. This was 17% below the amount raised by 34 companies in the first half of 2008, and 74% below the amount raised by 26 companies in the second half of 2008. For anyone who has followed the recent trends, not surprisingly the second quarter of 2009 was the lowest quarter recorded since 2007.
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