Tommy has been one of the most active tech angels in the region. With a past at Podio and ZYB, he has also been involved in GameAnalytics, Drivr, Astralis, Vivino, Peakon and many more. He has been a vocal angel, and one of the investors that is often in the spotlight. A spokesperson for tech opinions and entrepreneurship in Denmark.

He will take over the role as minister after Søren Pind.

“I wish we could have met under other circumstances. As a citizen and entrepreneur, I have always been wildly impressed with you. You are prepared to discuss ethics and morals and allow it to be ruler of policy. I have the deepest respect for that” said Tommy Ahlers to his predecessor.

Regarding his investments and future investements, he announced at the pressconference that he will step down as active investor, and become passive in the ones he has.

“The companies in which I have active investments I will change to passive ownership. The passive investments I have, will be administrated by an executive, so that there are no conflict of interest.”

The post Top angel investor becomes minister appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Besides that, the timing was very good as well – with Unity being the technology behind the tremendouslty popular Pokemon Go game, a lot of articles have focused on that as well.

(BTW – if you want see a cool demo of Unitys capabilities, watch this short film demo and be amazed!)

One unicorn, one big exit

But Unity is not the only gaming event this week. GameAnalytics, another startups developing tools in the game sector, has been acquired by Mobvista. The amount has not been made public, but it is rumoured to be atleast double digit million euros – a great exit, for the only 5 year old company! It has in that short time already achieved over 25 000 registered developers and more than 1 billion unique players tracked. Currently, the platform reports that it maintains over 350 million monthly active users and 22 000 active games.

A big deal

Both of these deals are huge, for this region. Just the aqcuisition by GameAnalytics is one of the biggest deals in a while. And both deals amplify the strength that there is already in gaming here. Besides the tech, there is a strong scene for gaming startups – and not just casual mobile games, just as well blockbusters (most recent, Tom Clancy’s The Division), and highly artistic games like Limbo, Monument Valley, and most recent hit, Inside.

The post A game-changing week for the region appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Above is a spreadsheet from my investment newsletter club with all the investments that we have gotten to our attention during 2013.
Disclaimer: There are, most likely, many more investments that we do not know about (yet), and we will try to update the document when we get to know about more.

Some interesting stats from investments in the region 2013

Updated 2014-01-02: got more information from Hampus Jakobsson. If you have any further info we should add, let us know.

• Total sum of investments: 55 million euros (roughly, with qualified estimates in those cases where the sum is unknown)
• Total number of investments: 52
• Most number of investments: SEED Capital (7)
• Largest investments: Sol Voltaics and Vivino

As can be seen from the numbers, none of them is big single investment (such as last years € 45M investment in Zendesk). So this year it has been mostly seed, series A and series B investments in the region.

Other interesting things from 2013

A very noteworthy happening from 2013 was Unitys rumored ‘no thanks’ to a € 575 million deal. Very interesting for them and the whole startup and gaming scene in the region!

There where also some interesting crowdfunding projects, most notably the release of the game Forced which got a lot of attention for its story, but also gadgets such as Leikr and NSA defeating services such as Heml.is. Also two very high profile ones, that however are still ongoing – Airtame and No More Woof. These are not in the list (even though they are already 100% financed) because they will first close in the beginning of 2014.

Why a focus on investments and funding?

We look at investment and funding for a couple of reasons:

1. It is relatively easy to get the information.
2. A startup that receives investment is ‘validated’ – it is not just a cool idea, somebody believes in it enough to put money into it.
3. Especially the later stage investment rounds (series A and above) are crucial for a startup to make it big. Therefor we deem those as very important.

What do we think about bootstrapping?

Our focus on investments does not mean that we think bootstrapping is in any way wrong. Indeed, my own company, Contentor, is bootstrapped. However, bootstrapping is in my opinion something that is great, especially in the first 1-5 years, but after that to grow truly international and make a difference, funding is almost always needed. Not just for the money and the people that can be hired because of the investment. It’s just as much for the connections and knowledge that the right investors bring. Connections such as inside-people at Google, Facebook or other important collaborators for the startup. Or connections to goverment and politicians that are relevant. Or for further investments and a future IPO. Having people onboard who have experience from earlier in very helpful in those cases.
So I believe bootstrapping is great to get going, try the product and build the first million euros in revenue. But to take it to the next level, to reach € 10M or more in revenue, funding often makes the crucial differences and speeds up the process.

Because of this, we care about funding here at Øresund startups.

Reporting on other stats as well

We will aim to try to get more numbers out in the future. Both Sweden and Denmark have core company numbers available for companies public. We will see what kind of report we can build form that – such as matching the startups in region to their revenues!

The post Updated: The year of 2013 – investments in startups in the region appeared first on Øresund Startups.

It was held over lunch at CreativeLab, the creative event concept at the SHIP co-working space. Because we have a policy of livecasting whatever we do, you can watch the recording above (Our new Bambuser channel can be found here).

If you want to download the slides, I have made them available on slideshare but there are quite low resolution there, so can be found as pdf here as well.

I am probably describing some of the startups a little bit wrong (sorry for that), and I missed some things in the presentation (corrected in the downloadable versions). But I hope it creates some value for you as the viewer anyway.

Update 1: Some have asked why so many people are walking around and the background noice – the location where the presentation was held is the auditorium in the CreativeLab, called “trappan”, and is just that: the main stairs between the first and second floor. It is designed to be in the middle of the entire place, so that any presentations held there can have drop-in / drop-out flow. A somewhat special enviroment, but I love it, often with a lot of student from Lunds University sitting around in the open areas, and the business and entrepreneurs on the stairs themselves…

Update 2: I should of course list the top 50 startups mentioned as well! Here they are (in the order presented, i.e. in alphabetical order after category):

Series A + B

B2C

• Billetto
• Miinto
• Vivino
• WatAGame (GoSupermodel)
• Zmags

B2B

• Codesealers
• Falcon Social
• FlatFrog Laboratories
• iMotions
• Neo technology (Neo4J)
• Octoshape
• Opbeat
• Serstech
• SimpleSite (123hjemmeside)
• Tradeshift
• Trustpilot
• Unity
• Vopium

Seed level

B2C

• Bownty
• Click-A-Taxi
• Coolstuff
• Flattr
• Foap
• Tasspass
• Retevo (Roliga Prylar / Alphageek)

B2B

• Anyfi
• Atosho
• Conferize
• Crunchfish
• Deskwolf
• Dexplora (GetSalesDone and brisk.io)
• Firmafon
• GameAnalytics
• Graduateland
• InRiver
• Insurance Business Applications
• OneRecruit
• Sepior
• The Eye Tribe
• Wallmob
• Zaplox

Other prominent startups

• 23
• Echo.it
• Kvittar
• MovieStarPlanet
• Momondo
• Planeto
• Riidr
• Zendesk

The post Øresund Startups: Top50 and state of the region appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Launched 8 months ago, GameAnalytics mission is to empower developers and nurture a culture of creativity with the analytical within game companies. In February, the company received a €1.7M investment.

Game developers can monitor their players with metrics-based feedback, how and when they are engaging, for how long, etc. GameAnalytics say Unity got the democratisation process going with game development tools to be competitive. The tools should be available everyone, not just big companies with resources for dedicated analysts and complex systems.

To make GameAnalytics free, and gain revenue, they’re working on more sophisticated data mining tools for enterprises, to be released over the next 6-12 months. A private beta is available already for one tool, Miner. Check it out or sign up for the original, 100% free.

The post Spread the word! GameAnalytics is now free! appeared first on Øresund Startups.

One of the things we want to focus on with Øresund Startups is tracking funding in startups in the region. The reason is simple: funding is an external validation that proves that somebody believes in a startup, and that it is not just a great idea, but also an idea that can be executed. We also believe that it is of interest for others seeking funding to know what funding deals have been made, and who possible investors are.

Therefor we have put together the data that we have been notified about the last 6 month, january – june 2013. We have done that in an simple spreadsheet, and listed a couple of data points:

• Date (approximatly)
• Invested amount (when disclosed)
• What startup
• Which investors
• Business sector of the startups (if B2B or B2C)
• What cluster in the region the startup belongs to

Some interesting investment highlights from the first 6 month of 2013:

Update: after publishing this we got some feedback with more investments we had missed. The numbers below are updated with the newest stats!

Of the investments we have registered:

• A total of 28 investments have been tracked. The total is not officially known, but our estimations and words from unofficial sources put the total to between 18-21 million euros.
• 14 of the 28 investments are Copenhagen based
• The biggest investment was in Crunchfish, but it was only slightly larger then others
• More or less equal B2B then B2C startups have received funding (14 B2B and 13 B2C and 1 that is both)
• SEED Capital was the most active investment fund
• SEED Capital was also the fund which has invested the most money in the period (according to released numbers)
• Half of the investments (14 of the 28) where from private investors, either a known angel / VC or a multitude of angels.
• Private investments also account for roughly half of the total value invested, around 8-10 million euros of the total 18-21 million euros (estimated in cases where not publicly known)

Note that the list above is only with data from 1 january – 30 june 2013. The recent big investments in Vivino as well as Opbeat are not part of it, they will be part of the next report.

As a bonus we also put together the numbers for our first month of operations, september – december 2012. However, as that is not a complete 6 month period we did not want to make a full report of that. The numbers can be found in the spreadsheet, in the second tab. These numbers may also be quite incomplete, as during that period we just started tracking startups and might have missed a lot.

Also – if you know about investments which we have missed, let us know! Either in an email or in the community group.

The stats are embeded at the top of the posts, but if you have trouble viewing them you can find them here as a Google Drive spreadsheet.

If you want to download the numbers as .csv you can find them here.

The post Updated! Report: investments in web and tech startups in the region – spring 2013 appeared first on Øresund Startups.

The Danish start-up provides a tool that helps game developers to collect and analyse data about gaming behaviour. Data analysis of gaming behaviour is then used to gain unique insights and to further develop the games towards the needs of the customer.

“Data analysis is widespread in many sectors, but for some reason this is not widespread in the gaming industry. This sector has seen very strong growth, where the optimization of existing products has not had the same focus as opposed to getting some games off the ground and to make some money.” says Jimmy Fussing Nielsen to Trendsonline.dk

GameAnalytics has operated with a beta version so far, and only now they will go the the market with their product.

“We run a closed beta version (a temporary version, continue to be developed and used by invited users, ed.) of our software over the past three or four months. It is only now that we really go to market with a commercial aim.” says Morten E. Wulff to Business.dk

It is an investment in a start-up, without a proven track record. However there seems to be an unfulfilled need for data analysis in this market which provides a unique and hopefully profitable opportunity for GameAnalytics.

The post GameAnalytics receives €1.7M investment appeared first on Øresund Startups.