Nordic Notes - Issue #6
15. August 2021 - Top lists & Nordic angels
Hey all,
I’m so happy to see more of you joining every week, thank you all for your support! If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter so far, please share the love 💕
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
Spaceit raised 1m€ for their satellite operations platform.
Innomost raised 5m€ for their innovation in upcycling birch bark.
Kavall raised 4.9m€ for their grocery delivery startup.
Nomono raised 5.4m€ for their audio platform.
Capturi raised 30m danish krona for their ai platform.
Remato raised 1.4m€ for their construction management platform.
PocketLaw raised 1.2m£ for scaling their legaltech startup in UK.
Did I miss something - send me a note!
Quick Notes
Coinify, a crypto payment infrastructure startup, was acquired for 85m$ by Voyager.
Cool stuff spotted on LinkedIn: digital paper coming soon.
Startup Estonia and the Estonian e-Residency program commissioned an analysis according to which third of Estonian startups founded by e-residents.
Sifted listed 50+ European angel investors focusing on sustainability.
Longer Notes
YAY! Wired published their list of hottest startups in Helsinki. The list includes the following companies IQM, Gubbe, Infinited Fiber, Flowrite, Enfuce, Solar Foods, Aiven, Varjo, Swappie & Sulapac. Most of the companies are actually quite far on their startup journey and in that sense Flowrite pops out from the crew as it was founded quite recently and their product has only been beta launched. All interesting companies none the less.
EU-startups also published a hot list, but of Oslo based startups that show promise. Some higlights from the list:
Equality Check - workplace equality review platform. Has raised 1.3m€.
Plaace - platform helping businesses find a rental premise. Has raised 1.2m€.
Savvie - helping businesses optimise their operations with data. Has raised 800k€.
And lastly in the longer notes, this week I noticed a couple interesting companies from the Nordics, but since they don’t have any recent funding rounds I thought I’d say a few words about them here.
Mö Foods is a super cool food brand focusing on products made from oats instead of dairy. They were recently featured in Kauppalehti (in Finnish, sorry) and raised an angel round of 300k€ in the spring.
Mantle is a skincare brand bringing cannabis beauty products to the Nordic market. According to Crunchbase their latest funding round was a little over 1m€.
Opinion
Since the theme of this issue of Nordic Notes is different kinds of top lists, let’s stick with that topic. Last week the wired list of hottest startups in Stockholm was featured, this week the same list from Helsinki as well as the EU-startups list of Oslo based startups to watch.
Looking at these lists from an early stage VC perspective, most of these companies are already quite far ahead and while they might be interesting for someone who isn’t actively involved in the ecosystems, they shouldn’t bring huge surprises to those who are well connected in the area.
What would be of great interest, at least to me, would be a top list gathered from angel investors. I would love to see a list of hottest startups in the Nordics where the contestants would be collected from the different angel groups in the countries.
According to NordicBAN, there are quite a few angel networks in the Nordics. These networks under NordicBAN all together gather around 2 000 angel investors & a list gathered from these people would be an interesting read.
NordicBAN also estimated in the end of 2018 that there are in total around 3 300 angel investors in the Nordics investing around 90m€ in total yearly. That’s quite a bit of money and many companies since angel the checks written by angels are typically quite small.
Lastly a small note to lighten up the mood that describes my feelings about last week perfectly xD
All the best,
Josefiina