Helen Ventures is the €50M energy CVC fund of Helsinki energy company Helen. Their investments are connected to energy: production, storage, transmission, usage, saving, carbon neutrality, digital and other operational solutions for a large energy company, and related solution areas like mobility and circular economy.
Domain: Automation software
OpenOcean invests into digital data-intensive solutions with significant indications of ability to sell and scale. B2B is a big plus, other business models are possible with very strong traction.
They have invested in open source solutions such as MySQL, MariaDB and RapidMiner. Other areas of especial interest include AI/ML, application-driven infrastructure and development tools, marketing technology, and automation and recommendation engines.
They look for cases that have a ready product + early revenue, a proven product-market fit. Typically they like to see companies already have €50k MRR (€500k/year recurring revenue).
They require a board seat as a condition of investing. They’re often the lead investor of a round.