Hey all,
It seems this week was quite uneventful in terms of funding rounds, maybe everyone is busy preparing for the main event of the year (hint: it’s Slush). Or then VCs have moved away from talking about new funding rounds on social media (I find this highly unlikely).
As always, happy to hear from you, let me know what I missed, what I can improve & what you’d like to read about!
Funding rounds
🇸🇪 Eperoto raised 270k€ for their legal tech company.
🇸🇪 Lassie raised 2m€ to insure pets.
🇪🇪 Grünfin raised 2m€ for their platform for sustainable investing.
🇸🇪 TrusTrace raised 5.17m€ for their supply chain transparency software.
🇸🇪 Juni announced that their series A round grew to 73m$ for their fintech.
Did I miss something - send me a note!
Quick Notes
Inventure is looking for an Office & Culture Manager.
Creandum is looking for an Associate and an Intern.
Longer Notes
Icebreaker.vc had a Head of Software join the team, interesting to see what comes out of it. I can’t remember if I’ve seen a Head of Software in any other VC company and the goals for the role were left a little unclear even in the blog post they published. I’m all for new innovation so will be exciting to see what a new role like that can bring.
Some thoughts on the Estonian startup ecosystem:
Opinion
This week, some thoughts on my favourite topic - women in VC and startups. This time inspired by Creandum publishing their Diversity Index 2021. I absolutely love that they proactively bring up the issues, report data from their team & portfolio and acknowledge where they need to improve.
In addition to the numbers mentioned in the report (it’s not too long, I encourage you all to check it out) I think it would be interesting to track the amount of funding received by female / male / mixed founding teams and women on the cap tables of startups.
the larger the companies are, the closer we get to 50%
Companies in the Creandum portfolio with under 50 employees had 30% women in teams. Typically earlier employees are more likely to be included in employee stock option programs or at least get a larger share. The gender split of earlier stages & ownership in the company definitely matters in terms of who gets a cut if the startup succeeds.
I want to be very clear here that I’m in no way criticising Creandum by commenting on what could be added. I believe that the first step to changing things is gathering data and they are showing a good example.
I quite recently read an article on TechCrunch on how to fix the female funding gap. Below some quotes from there.
Women investors are up to 3x more likely to fund women founders
we should focus on getting more seed checks into the hands of women founders
So getting more women to the table on the investing side and adding more startups founded by women to the start of the funnel are crucial. I would argue that this also means that we need more women doing angel investments and connecting with early stage VCs to share cases that they’ve invested in.
Inspirational tweet of the week, loving the attitude xD
All the best,
Josefiina