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.
Ticket size: €2-4M
Evli Growth Partners invest throughout Europe. Their home markets are the New Nordics: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
An insider view from their investment manager: https://medium.com/evli-growth-partners/vc-as-a-marketplace-and-other-learnings-from-the-first-year-in-vc-568dc2b1e7ad
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.
Prefer companies with revenue but have invested in strong pre-revenue companies as well. Most investments have a valuation €5-25M and typical tickets are €400k or more.
Especially interested in B2B and B2C companies in Automotive, IoT, Health, SaaS and Fintech fields.
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.