This week Rainmaking Loft welcomes 300 entrepreneurs at their 3000 square meter former naval facility by the harbor in Copenhagen – a cultural landmark building renovated at the cost of 1.3 million euros. The place is huge, and will bring different startups in the tech scene close to each-other.
“We want to create a full ecosystem here and that demands a range of different players. All the contacts you need as a promising startup to develop your potential and succeed globally,” says Managing Director at Rainmaking Loft, Kristian Justesen.
Among the startups moving in are the equity crowdfunding tool Raizers, Snaplytics, an analytics platform for Snapchat, and AppMonk that focuses on self-development apps. Besides the startups, a number of seats are reserved for business angels and industry specialists. It will also for the next couple of month be home for the cphftw foundation.
“The environment at Rainmaking Loft brings us closer to a lot of people necessary to our business. Those who can invest in it, but also skilled programmers and other IT businesses ready to join forces on projects.” says AppMonk CEO, Mathias Buch Iversen.
A proven concept
Rainmaking Loft is a tech co-working concept with established sister hubs in London and Berlin, where is houses over 400 entrepreneurs. It is also home to StartupBootcamp. It is run by the private company Rainmaking that has specialized in optimizing startups since 2006, and with corporate partners such as Tesco, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft BizSpark.
Residents have access to in-house services including a hotel room, an arcade hall, and a coffee shop. The top floor serves as an event space overlooking the old Holmen area to the East of the city.
Network effects
Rainmaking Loft will besides just being an office-space arrange pitching competitions and workshops that promote the knowledge exchange between residents, corporates, and VC’s.
“The regional entrepreneur scene used to be for entrepreneurs only. I’ve been looking for a place, where there is room for the investors as well as the guy coming in off his street with a skateboard and a crazy idea.” says Kim Tosti.
Kim Tosti represents BAC, a network of more than 60 business angels, at Rainmaking Loft. To him the place provides an overview of possible future investments.
One of many new centers for startups
Rainmaking Loft is another large and great place where tech startups will share knowledge and interact. It also shows the strength of the startup scene in the region: in just the last couple of years some really large and ambitious places have been established in the region. Startup Village has been created, with Founders House as well as some of the largest startups in the region having their offices there. The Ground has just opened, the E-commerce Park has been established and Media Evolution City has become a significant player in the region. All of these are amongst the top places for entrepreneurship and tech in the Scandinavia. As well as smaller, more creative places, such as Dare2Mansion and The Creative Plot, this all has created a large boost in hot-spots just recently.
This truly proves that the region is teeming with startups and entrepreneurship, given that all of these places, as well as older places such Minc, Mindpark and the rest, are filled with them.
