A new generation of European venture capital firms, including Switzerland’s Founderful, the Italian Founders Fund, and the Dutch Operator Fund, assert that they operate as “entrepreneurs supporting entrepreneurs”
Swedish fund Node.vc has now joined this group, providing €71 million in financing to invest in startups throughout the Nordics and Baltics, despite the fact that it may still be premature to label it a trend.
“I trust that it is the beginning of a trend,” stated John Elvesjö, the managing partner of Node.vc, in an interview with TechCrunch. “Europe has been significantly behind the United States in terms of operational experience among VC investors.”
The concept of being founder-led and operator experience is frequently promoted in marketing materials; however, upon closer examination, it is frequently rather superficial.
Node.vc’s affiliations with entrepreneurship are not merely superficial. That is the case with its investment team. Elvesjö, who is the second-to-last individual on the right in the image, co-founded the Swedish eye-tracking startup Tobii, which went public in 2015.
However, this is also the case for its limited partners, which consist of 70 founders. They have a natural inclination to invest their time, despite the fact that they are not obligated to contribute anything beyond money.
Nevertheless, Node.If institutional investors had not been secured, it is probable that vc would have been unable to conclude a fund of this magnitude. Saminvest, Sweden’s fund-of-funds, and Nordea’s life and pension subsidiary comprise its limited partners.
This is particularly noteworthy for a first-time fund, and it is doubly noteworthy for one that employs an unconventional method of VC arithmetic.
“We intentionally have a team that is slightly larger than the fund’s typical capacity to finance.” Elvesjö explained that the reason for this is that they are entrepreneurs who are in the process of establishing a venture capital firm.
Node.vc anticipates that it will have sufficient personnel to support the seven startups it intends to support annually, with eight full-time and eight part-time employees, several of whom have previously worked at the Nordic venture capital firm Brightly Ventures.
The remainder of the equation is more typical for a fund of that magnitude. According to Elvesjö, “We generate an average entry ticket of €1.3 million and have the capacity to continue for an extended period.” “We have the capacity to invest up to 10 million euros in a single company if we desire.”
The fund is sector-agnostic, but it concentrates on three themes, as evidenced by its three existing transactions. The future of amusement is represented by Roro, a gaming studio in the portfolio.
Lemonado and Starhive represent the future of work. Platform technologies, including fintech, IoT, cloud infrastructure, and machine intelligence, are also included.
These themes are consistent with the Nordic region’s assets and sectors; however, Elvesjö and his colleagues only recognized this after conducting extensive research.
“We made a significant investment in determining the direction of trends, and we then condensed it and presented it in a slide. The slide indicates that we believe the Nordic ecosystem will continue to excel in its current capacities,” he chuckled.
Paradoxically, the fact that numerous Scandinavian companies have terminated employees may also be advantageous for the region’s startup scene.
Elvesjö asserts that “talent in the Nordics is more accessible than it has been in the past five years.” This is the reason why Node.vc is so optimistic about its geography:
The Nordics are “extremely well positioned to harvest this,” as AI tools are poised to “disrupt pretty much every industry.”
