The Danish Innovation Fund’s Innofounder incubator will continue to be operated by Second Foundation until at least 2029. With around 140 startups going through the program each year, the incubator’s leaders have now worked with more than 680 startups across 40+ industries, giving them a rare vantage point on what makes early-stage teams succeed or fail.
Innofounder is a 12-month, full-time incubator program for early-stage entrepreneurs with innovative, knowledge-based ideas that are beyond the concept stage but not yet market-ready, with little or no revenue and limited prior external funding. It has the option of providing a limited amount of funding as well, up to € 14.000 (DKK 100.000).
In an interview with Bootstrapping.dk, the leaders of the incubator shared their key learnings. Lotus Søs Nellemann, Head of Business Mentoring, points to two common mistakes in a startup’s first twelve months: founders who build blindly without validating their assumptions about their target audience, and founders who refine their MVP until it becomes a maximum viable product instead of a minimum one.
But the most striking pattern she highlights is not about product at all. It is the silent trap of co-founder disagreements about roles, direction, and ambitions that founders postpone because it is easier to focus on the product.
“It’s rarely the product itself that brings down a team in the first year. It’s the conversations they missed,”
said Lotus Søs Nellemann, Head of Business Mentoring at Second Foundation.
The interview also covers how generative AI has changed early-stage building. Since 2023, the incubator has followed more than 420 startups building under AI conditions, and the leaders describe how small teams now move dramatically faster, with multi-agent tools compressing development cycles that once took years into weeks. At the same time, they emphasize that prioritization has become more important than the ability to build: it does not matter if you can build 50 new features in an afternoon if they are not relevant to customers.
You can read the full interview at Bootstrapping.dk: https://bootstrapping.dk/innofounder-inkubatoren-fortsaetter-hos-second-foundation-til-2029-hvad-er-laeringen-fra-680-startups/
About Innofounder
The Innofounder incubation process is operated by Second Foundation and combines mentoring from experienced founders with business design and workshops. Applicants must have completed a higher education, can apply individually or in teams of up to three founders, and must work full time on the idea in Denmark, owning at least 12.5 percent of the company. The company must have a Danish CVR number when the program starts and be no more than five years old. It is open for businesses within a variety of industries, such as green technology, life science and welfare technology, new strategic technologies, and defense and security technology.
