€ 32 million profit

The venture industry has been through some trials and tribulations, and the development of SEED Capital’s funds are not to be underappreciated. The accounts for Fund 2 has a bonus of € 32 millions (237 million DKK) on the bottom line in 2014, making this the third consecutive year of positive results. The portfolio includes startups like of Vivino, Reapplix, Trustpilot and, the latest addition, Mofibo. There are several exits in sight and many of the companies are making good progress, with Galecto Biotech having entered into an agreement with Brystol-Myers Squibb, which has a potential value of € 335 million. If followed through, we will likely see the effect of this agreement on the 2015 reports.

So what is the secret behind SEED Capital’s seemingly consistent choice of winners? According to managing partner, Ulla Brockenhuus-Schack, it involves strategic thinking and some amount of risk-taking.

“Venture is hard, takes time and patient investors. Portfolio-focused thinking is essential in this game and it is important to understand that you have to launch many ships as it is not easy to predict which ones will end up being a success, “she says.

With numbers like these, what big plans does SEED Capital have in store for 2015?

“The whole venture capital industry has gone through a long learning curve over the last 10 years… We have become better at spotting winning companies and today our investments are made somewhat closer to the market than in 2005. I have great expectations for our second fund and believe that it will deliver excellent returns for our investors.” says Brockenhuus-Schack.

Public and private money

SEED Capital is not without some controversy. It’s mixture of public and private money, say some are giving it incentives not aligned with the rest of the VC community. However, the fund has shown good progress over the years.

SEED Capital has a strong partnership with the government funded innovation incubator Pre-Seed Innovation and they are able to invest € 250 000 – 750 000 at the early stages of a startups development, allowing a startup an opportunity to prove their technology and business. Depending on capital need, SEED Capital can then later invest up to € 9 million in the upcoming rounds – preferably in syndication with international investors.

The post SEED Capital Makes Record-Breaking Profits appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Also celebrating startup successes

The event however was also about celebrating startup successes in general. It had two high-profile sessions: Mikkel Svane, of Zendesk fame, and Mette Lykke, from Endomondo. With Zendesks IPO and Endomondos exit to Under Armour, these two startups are the most high profile born in Copenhagen in recently.

Mikkel gave a presentation about Zendesk, how it started, lessons learned and insights.

“We had no idea what we were doing. We truly didn’t. But we tried a lot.”

– was one of Mikkels insights. One of the hard parts about being an entrepreneur he felt was the mixture of optimism, with realism.

“You have to embrace that you will succeed. But also that you will fail.”

He also emphasised that Zendesk should not be regarded as a clear case for how to build a startup. It was a lucky shot, being at the right time at the right circumstances. However, he said it is also a combination of luck and seeing the opportunity. They never planned on having such an impact with their early product, but when they saw the interest it got from all around the world, they quickly realised they had a chance to do something big, and decided to act on it.

“As a startup you have to open all the doors.”

Insights into being acquired

Mette held a fireside chat, being interviewed by Kasper Hulthin. With both of them being founders at startups that have been acquired by big international corporations, there were a lot of questions about how it felt and the struggle with being acquired. Insights into the due diligence process, the challenge of keeping the double focus of building a startup while being in long negotiations with potential acquirers, and handling the communication around it, both to ones own employees as well as outsiders.

Mette also talked about Endomondos journey, and how it all stared. With all founders being former McKinsey, it was rather easy to get started. She drew smiles with the stories:

“We had no problem getting VC meeting. The PowerPoint was really nice!”

However, a lot of focus was also on the tough times Endomondo had been thru, especially the downsizing and hard decisions that needed to be made in 2012.

The fireside chat was very insightful, and of high value for a lot of the entrepreneurs in the audience – getting to know the feeling and troubles with being acquired is a good knowledge to have.

It is great to see that the community celebrates and talks about successes in this way, and that there is a chance to meet and learn between entrepreneurs. A great work by the #cphftw team for organising another simple yet high value event!

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Jay-Z buys Aspiro

The first one was that Jay-z buying Aspiro, the company behind the music service WiMP and Tidal. This deal, valued at almost € 50 million ($ 56 million), is huge for the Malmö-based company. Even if no longer a startup, as it listed on the Stockholm OMX stock exchange.

Aspiros music services has over 500 000 paying users on its WiMP and Tidal services, which is an impressive number, even if far behind Spotify’s 15 million subscribers, it still makes it an strong player in the music services field.

Endomondo acquired by Under Armour

The deal that was both big and directly startup related, was Endomondos exit last week, at € 57 million ($ 85 million), to Under Armour. You can read more about the deal in our post. This was a big exit for a startup from the region, and Endomondos journey has been impressive!

Update: even more impressive – it has been revealed that just days before the deal was signed, 38 current and former employees got a chance to get shares of the startup. A total of 12.67 percent was in this way handed over to employees – and made almost everyone working at the startup a good amount of money! Things like these are really valuable for the startup community, as it enables more experienced people to invest in other startups or have a runway when they try their own venture.

Canon buys Axis

The even bigger news was Canon buys Lund-based Axis. The sum? A cool € 2.4 billion ($ 2.8 billion)… Axis has been one of the strongest success stories in the region, starting out with selling print servers, and having expanded into new fields over the years, with network and security cameras (go to website link to learn more) becoming a big area. Axis has now grown to be one of the biggest companies in the video surveillance market, were it is estimated to have a 17.5 percent global market share. The deal will make Canon a top player this market.

Important for the region

With these three deals, the region has seen huge things already for 2015. I hope that with the founders all in the region, this will be a boost for other startups as well, and something that will strengthen the startup scene in general. With the deals both more money, but also even more crucial, more experience, is held by people here.

The post Huge deals bolster the tech scene appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

“It has been a classic entrepreneurial experience with many ups and downs – but we always believed in the vision. Endomondo has helped so many people find joy in exercising and as part of Under Armour we can reach out to even more people on a global scale. Our mission is unaltered – we will still be Endomondo focusing on making exercise more fun and our team will still be based in Copenhagen. For our users this means that we will have more resources to grow and improve our product. We are looking forward to this next step,” says founder of Endomondo, Mette Lykke in official press-release.

Endomondo was founded in 2007 by three Danish entrepreneurs Christian Birk, Jakob Jønck and Mette Lykke, who left their careers in management consulting at McKinsey & Company to pursue a new risky venture as entrepreneurs. Two co-founders Christian Birk and Jakob Jønck left operational side of the company a few years ago, but Mette Lykke remained company’s CEO up until now.

The past couple of years was particularly successful for Endomondo. With about 30 million downloads, the company reported to have over 20 million active users in 2013. Such high user growth rate is attributed to apps social networking aspects. Endomondo not only tracks different kinds of phisical activities but it also allows to connect with friends and other community members through app’s network in order to give or receive motivation for workouts.

Since the time of creation, the funding was never an easy question for Endomondo, especially in the earlier periods when GPS systems were not yet integrated parts of mobile phones. However, things turned around in 2010 with SEED Capital’s investment in the company. During the time of its existence Endomondo managed to raise 8.2$ million in financing.

Congratulations to Endomondo with a new page in company’s history!

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“Growth hacking is a very large and very interesting tool box, that you can apply to your online business” says Morten Elk, Founder of SimpleSite, presenter of the event

For this event, six speakers were invited to tell the audience about their companies marketing; tools that worked well and the obstacles they had to overcome. The speakers of the evening were:

• Matias Møl Dalsgaard, GoMore
• Kaare Danielsen, Jobindex
• Peter Schlegel, Admazely
• Tomas Gorrissen, Responsive
• Ture Dahl, Endomondo
• Martin Bjergegaard, Pine Tribe

About the event

The speakers had about 15 minutes each to tell the audience about their experiences. They all spoke about various considerations and choices they’ve made in hope to make the company grow. Some choose to talk broadly about their experiences, while others went into detail. Common feature of most of them was to point out the importance to find a niche in order to make the company grow.

“You need to find a niche and do it differently from everybody else. It doesn’t really have to be better, but just differently” says Ture Dahl, Endomondo

For those looking for inspiration for their own business or are generally interested in different approaches in marketing an online business, the events organized by Nordic Growth Hackers is strongly recommended. Also, on their homepage you can find a collection of resources that are regarded as interesting and instructive for online businesses.

Did you miss the event? The event was filmed, so in the near future you will luckily be able to find it online on the YouTube channel, where also the previous videos can be found. And take the opportunity to book the next event even now; on April the 23^rd the doors will open to a new and exciting event organized by Nordic Growth Hackers!

The post A great follow up for Nordic Growth Hackers appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

The entrepreneurs participating in Geist consist of nine respected and successful startups:

• Kasper Hulthin, Podio
• Mette Lykke, Endomondo
• Michael A. Hansen, Komfo
• Martin Falslev, Trendsales
• Ken Villum Klausen, Wallmob
• Søren Halskov Nissen, drivr
• Peter Michael Oxholm Zigler, AutoButler
• Mogens Storgaard Jakobsen, Userreport
• Christian Steffensen, Kirkeweb

Together they come up with 10 recommendations to the government officials to enable a growing success of the Danish National IT and tech startups, and the result is also indirectly an evaluation of public actions aimed at entrepreneurs.

The 10 recommendations are both harsh as well as open-minded. It contains some solid tips such as #1 “remove the brand”, which emphasises that public run initiatives are looked down upon in the community, and it might be better to ‘hide’ that they are government run, and put entrepreneurs in the front. Other advices are such as #5 “Join us!”, that the public officials need to be present at meet ups and co-working spaces, and should not expect entrepreneurs to come to them if they want help. They need to build a relationship with them.

It also contains some more controversial, such as #3 “spoil the elite”, which argues that by helping the ones with the largest ambitions thru special services will enable better business development, instead of treating a freelancer in the same way as a ‘born global’ startup.

You can find all 10 advices here.

Update: Due to popular demand we have translated the rules to English. They can be found here.

“Geist is public run, and there a lot of public projects launched, and Geist is a kind of evaluation of them. It is a good idea, it is thought-thru. Instead of putting officials in an office this gets a dialogue with entrepreneurs.” says Christian Steffensen from Kirkeweb to Trendsonline.

Trendsonline has a longer article with both Christian Steffensen and Søren Halskov Nissen and their thoughts.

The post Geist: Experienced entrepreneurs give 10 rules to the government appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

350 startup people on boxes

It was definitely a somewhat different event. The location, the big hall in the historic Børsen, became a sharp contrast to the DIY chairs, that consisted of moving boxes, also known as “sitzkartons“. These gave rise to a somewhat different scene – with everybody starting out the meet-up with folding their own chairs.

Workshops

The evening consisted of three parts. The first one was to talk about the community, and how it could be made better. It also got some background to how it all started, with the #cphftw workshop in december.

One part of the workshops was going into details of why a strong community is important. Some of the thoughts and knowledge that were shared:

“There’s a lot of stuff happening but nobody knows about it. A lot of people are working in the same direction but not together. And it would be nice to get more then 30 people to also the smaller events.” was voiced by Michael Reibel Boesen.

“This is a three way process. You start with a meeting like this, and then within 6 month, the press will start to be there. And once the media gives it attention, the politicians will too. And that is when a community becomes a force that can change politics.” were Tyler Crowley words of advice to the community.

“It is important with the commons, something that is shared by all entreprenuers. Just like the air, or the roads, a framework that provides shared interest. We need a place where Startups are not competing. Where they can share knowledge.” said Martin von Hallers

During the workshops that followed the DIY chairs were put to good use as well, with them being stand-ins for pappers or drawing boards. This resulted in a lot of boxes filled with doodles and suggestions of how to improve the community.

Also announced was that a logo for #cphftw would be crowdsoured, with suggestions welcomed to be sent in – either as complete logos, or just as ideas for a logo.

Inspirational round

After the workshops and a background on the community, the even more exciting parts started. 8 startups that had been in the news recently or were for another reason relevant, got 2 minutes each to talk about who they are, what they do and what they had achieved recently. The presentations were:

Adam Wiggins who has founded Heroku and was a special guest. He talked about why sharing stories and community is important and what it has meant for him. However, he also emphasised the most important part:

“Get out there and build some great Startups”

Lars Thinggaard from Milestone – probably the most unknown of the big startups in the region:

“50% of our profits in the U.S., we are 400 people and have 13 offices around the world.”

Jonas Gyalokay, from Airtame, about their recent successful crowdfunding:

“We started out as a hobby projects two years ago. We just closed a crowdfunding round of over 1 million dollars. Now we are in delivery mode, we need to ship by summer, so I am going back to work.”

Rasmus Makwarth from OpBeat, who told what they are doing, but also with a focus on the business angels that have invested in the startup.

Michael Buch Sandager presented AdQuota and their recent aquisition and plans:

“We have a vision to create the best pan-European mobile advertising platform. We recently raised 2,5 million euro, and also bought a company in Spain, to continue our pan-European expansion.”

Bertrand Bisson from DealCircle, about how they want to make angel investment easier and smoother in Europe:

“I am crazy enough to think I can distrust the legal industry.”

Mette Lykke from Endomondo:

“We were three consultants, that wanted to solve a big problem. We decided healthcare was that problem. We wanted to use technology to make fitness more fun.” 

And last, but no means least, was Gert Sylvest from Tradeshift, who recently closed the €55M investment round.

“Our company started as a tweet, to Morten Lund, who put us into contact with the startup eco-system. Today we are 150 people, and just landet our biggest investment”  he said.

“We are solving a problem, and aim to connect every company in the world, so that no one has to type data from one paper to another.”

He also ended with a small advertisment: They are having a hackathon in their offices this thursday.

The round of presentation all got large applauses, and it was great to see the atmosphere that arouse from the short but well done presentations.

Which startups that will be on stage at the next meeting was also announced will be crowdsourced – so follow this link if you know a company that should be promoted to the entire scene.

Community

The last part was that seven community events were presented. These were:

• Kenneth Auchenberg who presented the monthly CPH JS meetups
• Ben Page, who presented the Nordic Next conference, and said that new entrepreneurs and business angels were welcome to apply, but had best chance if by referals
• Techbbq was presented by Klaus Nyengaard, and he said that it will be even bigger this year, and also took the opportunity to invite to better collaboration with Nordic Startup Conference, so that these two big conference not are that closely timed.
• Dave Mariner talked about the Founder Anonymous concept, and about opening a chapter in this region.
• Jasenko Hadzic presented the Nordic Startup Conference, and echoed Klaus opening for increasing collaboration for the next.
• Neil Murray presented Nordic Web, a website that will focus on content and being data provider for the nordic startup scene. The site has been in progress, and launched officially today!
• Martin LeBlanc presenter Forge, and how they aimed to do a mix between a meetup and a conference. 

Very inspiring to hear all the great events that happen and the people behind it!

As with the other parts, what community arrangements that will be presented on the next meet-up will also be crowdsourced. Anyone can make suggestions here.

This was a packed and intense event, and we look forward to how the community will evolve during the next couple of month – and we are excited about the next #cphftw meetup, which was announced to be on the 3rd of June!

The post First #cphftw meetup! appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

It will present Danish startup success stories, such as Podio, Endomondo, Tradeshift, Zendesk, Unity, Just-Eat, Vivino and many more.

The first article the FOCUS series revolves around Endomondo. Endomondo was created in Copenhagen, but is now successful in over 20 countries. Endomondo is a GPS tracking app that traces the users work-out, connects the user to their friends, and analyzes the training. The founders, Mette Lykke and her co-founders Christian and Jakob, started out of their apartments using their own savings. Eventually, they secured money from a Danish business angle for the first round, using the money to conquer the American market. After some experimental time on how to make more money for the Endmondo business, Mette and her co-founders finally agreed on selling a Pro version of Endomondo, and providing Premium accounts. At last, their new business model which focuses on providing support to companies to make exercising more attractive to their employees, Endomondo can be proud of a growing user-base, being a leader on the fitness market, and ultimately a role model for Danish startup businesses.

We think this is a great initiative, and are looking forward to the upcoming articles! This is a great way to encourage developing startups on their long way to success, and to receive valuable advice from successful startups. Read the full one about Endomondo over at TrendsOnline.

The post Trendsonline launches FOCUS – Danish startup success stories appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Back in 2011 Endomondo had 625,000 users and no clear business model. However, the company has managed to receive a number of investments for business development. The potential for Endomondo was revealed with Apple’s launch of iPhone with built-in GPS that made it clear that the company was on the right track all along, which was followed by new rounds of investments, particularly from SEED Capital.

Now, two years later, Endomondo has 18 million users and it is one of the most downloaded training apps. It has also become clear that being located in the US is not as beneficial for the company.

“It turned out to be extremely expensive to attract the right developers, and we were up against Facebook, Google and Apple. So we had neither brand or monetary capacity to attract the right people . So we have gone off again and now we are gathered here,” says Mette Lykke to JP.dk

This year Endomondo has reached its first surplus of 200,000 danish kronor and equity of 16 million which makes the company one of the major success stories for its investors.

The post Endomondo: reaching first profits with a user base of 18 million appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

The following startups from the Copenhagen region made it:

• Big Bite Games – Gaming
• BIMobject – Internet
• CirCal – Mobile
• Conferize – Internet
• Crunchfish – Telecommunications
• Endomondo – Software
• Falcon Social – Social Media
• FlatFrog – Consumer Electronics
• iMotions – Eye Tracking – Software
• Me-Mover – Clean Tech
• Realfiction – Marketing
• The Eye Tribe – Software
• Trustpilot – Internet
• Upfront Chromatography – Biotech
• Xstream – Software

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