From Switzerland's Founderful to Italian Founders Fund and Dutch Operator Fund, European VC startups claim to operate as “entrepreneurs supporting entrepreneurs.”
It may be too early to call it a trend, but Swedish fund Node.vc has joined the group, raising €71 million to expand into startups in the Nordic and Baltic countries.
“We hope this is the start of a trend,” Node.vc Managing Partner John Elvesjö told TechCrunch. “Europe lags far behind the US in terms of operating experience for VC investors…There is a lot of marketing about founder-led and operator experience, but if you scratch the surface, typically It's quite thin.”
Node.vc's connection to entrepreneurship runs deeper than the surface level. That also applies to the company's investment team. Elvesjö (pictured penultimate right) is the co-founder of Tobii, a Swedish eye-tracking startup that went public in 2015. But that also applies to limited partners, which includes 70 companies. Founders. They have no obligation to add anything more than money, but they also have a natural tendency to invest their time.
But Node.vc probably wouldn't have been able to close a fund of this size if it hadn't also secured institutional investors. The company's LPs include Swedish fund of funds Saminvest and the life and pensions arm of Nordic bank Nordea. This is notable for a first fund, but even more so for a fund that takes an unusual approach to VC calculations.
“Our team is intentionally set to be a bit large, which means we have more people on the team than the fund would normally be able to fund. Because he's an entrepreneur and he's founding a venture capital firm,” Hervéchaud said.
Node.vc has eight full-time and part-time staff, several of whom previously worked at Scandinavian VC firm Brightly Ventures, and has extensive experience working with the seven startups it plans to support each year. You should have the ability.
The rest of the equation is more typical for a fund of that size. “We are writing an average admission ticket of 1.3 million euros and can continue for a very long time,” Herbechaux said. “If you wish, you can actually invest up to 10 million euros in a single company.”
The fund, which has already made three deals, is sector agnostic but focuses on three themes. There is a future in entertainment, represented by our portfolio company, game studio Roro. The future of work with Lemonado and Starhive. Platform technologies include fintech, IoT, cloud infrastructure, and machine intelligence.
These themes correlate with the strengths and areas for which the Norse are known, but Hervéchaux and his partners only realized this after spending a great deal of research effort.
“We made this huge investment to understand where the trends were going and condensed it into slides. What the slides say is that the Nordic ecosystem has “I think I will continue to be good at what I was good at,” he laughed.
Paradoxically, the fact that several Scandinavian unicorns have let people go may also be beneficial for its startup scene. According to Elvesjö, “Talent is more available in Northern Europe than in the past five years,” which is why Node.vc is particularly bullish on its geography. AI tools are set to “disrupt almost every industry” and Scandinavia is “very well placed to harvest this”.