Doing sustainability and impact investing: mobility, food and agriculture, energy (renewable, efficiency, storage), water, waste etc. Looking for indications of repeat demand.
Looking for defensible market positions. Technology is not necessary, if the position of the company is otherwise strategically defensible.
Investing globally with a focus on Europe. Also investing actively in Africa and Asia.
Focus on B2B across all their funds.
Prefer to lead or co-invest. Prefer to take a board seat.
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.
Nordic Ninja is funded by large Japanese technology companies, but investment decisions are made locally. They have connections to large companies especially in Japan, having partnerships with global giants such as Panasonic, Omron and Honda.
They don’t invest in games, crypto or pharma. They’re widely interested in everything else, including but not limited to robotics, automation, health tech, AI and mobility.
They prefer to co-invest with a local investor, but can also lead or be the sole investor on a round. They’re often willing to serve on company boards.
Wave Ventures specializes in millennial solutions, but not exclusively. In terms of sectors they look at everything except games and pharma. Their investment focus is further described here: https://link.medium.com/tXSCKREFN4
They prefer contacts at team@wave.ventures.
SpeedUp invests in companies that have a connection with Poland. This can come in many forms within 5 years after the investment, for example R&D or sales.
Most of their investments are in B2B, B2B2C and SaaS companies. B2G is possible in cases with strong indications of ability to sell and scale.
It’s common for them to be the only investor in the round, but they’ll be happy to lead or co-invest as well.
SpeedUp has two funds with different investment criteria.
Ticket size €600k – 1M, sweet spot 750k, maximum total allocation per company 5M.
Product type: Any tech except pharma, very rarely also Marketplaces (connection with e.g. energy, IoT, industry, smart manufacturing, cleantech)
Revenue: €100k/y or more.
Product readiness level: Product or Scaling
Valuation: Max €10M
Ticket size €200k-250k, sweet spot 250k, maximum total allocation per company 250k (no follow-on).
Product type: Any tech that has an R&D component. No marketplaces. Pharma is possible.
Revenue: None or any.
Product stage: Proof of Concept, Prototype or Product.
Valuation: Max €4M
The company’s requirements for a connection with Poland are more strict.
The information below is generated automatically from the investor’s overall information in our database, which doesn’t separate between different funds of the same investor.
Apex Ventures is a deep tech fund headquartered in Vienna. Their home markets are the German-speaking DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). They’re happy to lead investment rounds into companies from these countries and co-invest in companies from elsewhere in Europe.
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.