Inventure, a Nordic and Baltic venture capital entity, is creating a €150 million fund to support the best founders in the area, including Estonia; the fund has secured €144 million of the target €150 million.
Among the participants of the fund are the European Investment Fund, Ilmarinen, Molten Ventures, OP, Finnish Industry Investment Tesi as well as Nordea Finland and Nordea Sweden.
“Just like Nordic and Baltic founders, European VC has matured as an asset class. We’re honoured to bring in a very high level of institutional funding by supporting great entrepreneurs through good times and bad, helping them scale to the next level, and then coming home with consistent, stellar returns,” Sami Lampinen, a partner at Inventure, said in a statement.
The fund says it “is one of the most active early-stage investors in Europe. Since 2005, Inventure has backed 87% of its portfolio in its first institutional round of funding, including the unicorn Wolt, which was acquired last year by DoorDash. With over 80 portfolio companies, Inventure has created a deep network across B2B SaaS, fintech, deep tech, marketplaces and consumer sectors.”
The fund recently led a €11.6 million funding round for Jobbatical, an Estonian borderless living technology platform. Its previous investments include the work management solution Scoro and language learning platform Lingvist.
Initial tickets between €200,000 to €5 million
“As an early-stage investor, we can say one of Estonia’s strengths is that there are so many strong angel investors who have come out of fantastic companies like Pipedrive, Skype and Wise,” Greg Anderson, the fund’s head of communications, told Estonian World.
“Our value-add is to help founders close these angel-driven early-stage rounds with an international investor. We bring in a strong focus on helping founders with talent and expansion tactics – two of the most important criteria that later-stage investors are looking for.”
The fund is aiming to invest in initial tickets between €200,000 to €5 million, with 60% of the fund dedicated to follow-on funding.
Inventure is an investment fund for the Nordics and the Baltics, serving entrepreneurs from offices in Helsinki and Stockholm. Since 2005, it has backed over 80 portfolio companies including Wolt, Swappie and Insurello, and has €380 million under management.
