Hey all,
It’s been a wild ride in Finland with the weathers giving us spring & winter weathers every other week - it’s been a little snowy in the past few days. At this point we wouldn’t be surprised if it was snowing on Midsummer Day too.
As always, happy to hear from you, let us know what we missed, what we can improve on & what you’d like to read about!
All the best,
Funding rounds
🇫🇮 ICEYE raises €87M to further accelerate investment in a SAR satellites and expand their data and subscription product portfolio
🇩🇰 Flatpay secures €45M to expand its transparent payment solutions for SMBs
🇺🇸/🇸🇪 Oden Technologies raises €26.8M to solve productivity plateaus in manufacturing
🇫🇮 Basemark raises €22M to offer a safer driving experience using AR
🇩🇰 Reshape raises €18.8M for advanced biological research automation
🇸🇪 Mimo secures €18M to streamline SMB finances
🇸🇪 Gilion secures €10M to expand tech financing solutions
🇳🇴 HoloSurge secures €8.9M grant to revolutionize surgical planning
🇸🇪 Blykalla secures €6.8M for lead-cooled small modular reactors
🇩🇰 REDUCED raises €6M to scale natural food ingredients business
🇱🇹 Saltz raised €3M to build fresh products marketplace
🇸🇪 OlsAro nets €2.5M for its AI-enabled crop-breeding platform
🇫🇮 NPHarvest raises €2.2M to recycle nutrients from wastewater
🇸🇪 Saveggy raises €1.76M to address food waste with their edible coating
🇱🇹 CTO2B closes €1M for automated DevOps on-cloud infrastructure
🇱🇹 Softloans raises €1M to transform small business financing
🇱🇹 Blackswan Space secures €760K to pioneer satellite autonomy
🇱🇻 inGain raises €650K to expand no-code SaaS platform for lending
🇪🇪 Vectiopep raises €450K to help immune system fight cancer
Did we miss something - send us a note!
Quick Notes
Applications for the batches starting this fall are now open - read more here.
An initiative called “Climate Brick” was launched, it includes 7 “bricks” explaining the climate tech scaling journey for each of these - read more here.
Pale Blue Dot VC is hiring for a marketing & comms role.
Opinion
The Finnish Venture Capital Association (FVCA) published the 2023 numbers on 11th of April - you can find the whole report in english here & in finnish here. As always, there’s a lot of interesting data in the report so we’d encourage everyone to read the whole report as well.
A couple key points from the report:
VC funding to Finnish companies dropped by 58% compared to 2022
the drop in funding from foreign VCs was notable
the number of companies that gained funding did not drop significantly
Finnish VC funds were able to fundraise well to their funds
We thought we’d also highlight a couple graphs from the report. The first one shows how Finnish VC funds have been able to collect capital to their funds. As we can see, 2022 & 2023 have actually been very good years when we look at the data for a longer period of time.
The second image shows the significant drop in funding for startups (green=seed, blue=start-up, red=later stage venture). The number of companies however did not drop (thinner pale blue line).
That’s all for today, enjoy the week folks!
Thank you for reading Nordic Notes, your biweekly guide to the Nordic startup ecosystem. If you enjoyed this issue, please like it and share it with your friends.
Thanks for sharing. ICEYE continue to rock but Basemark and NPHarvest were new ones for me.
Great to see Finnish companies tackling such important challenges.