Established entrepreneurs Hampus Jakobsson and Karl-Anders Johansson are the brilliant minds behind the new plot for having bought the property after receiving an expert property advice, and then turning it into an entrepreneur-house. The two have worked together in Tat, which they co-founded.

The 15th of January is moving-in day and renovations are currently in full swing Several of the companies moving in currently reside in Jard on Stora Nygatan 36.

According to Hampus Jakobsson, there’s no need to worry about bad blood between the rental owner of Stora Nygatan and the entrepreneur-duo. The move is purely in the interest of acquiring more space and the two have nothing but praise for their former location:

“The Jard building was too small, so we decided to find something new. But to anyone who is seeking a central facility of 200 square meters, Jard is super nice.”

The new entrepreneur-house is also the center for the start-up entrepreneur group Malmo Startups. The house includes ample meeting and recreation areas which Hampus Jakobsson believes is important to get business started.

We all know that the most defining characteristic of a house is its name, although Shakespeare might not agree, so what do they plan to call it?

“We don’t know yet, it’s tricky. Either we keep Jard or we come up with something new,” says Hampus Jakobsson.

We wish the two entrepreneurs and the twelve companies involved the best of luck and hope for a safe and hassle-free move!

Read more on the story at SydSvenskan.

The post New Entrepreneur-house in Malmö appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

A startup conference for investors

The conference, which is an evening and one full day, is limited to 70 participants. It’s focus is unlike most on the investors, and not the startups. This is noticeable in the participants – being mainly business angels from all over Scandinavia and venture capital firms from all over Europe and the US. Ten startups from the Nordics were invited to present their businesses to what was a high profile crowd. Many video transcribing services were also hired so as to help the participants who were not fluent in English, understand the discussions that were going on at the conference.

The aim of the event is twofold – to build relationships between investors in the Nordics, as well as being a good place for later stage startups to present themselves for further investments. The smaller size of the event achieves an intimate and open atmosphere.

Quality over Quantitiy

The attendees list included some of the biggest international venture capitalist firm in the startup community, including Accel Parterns, Balderton Capital, DFJ Esprit, Wellington Partners, and Early Bird Ventures, as well as most of the local Nordic firms including Creandum, North Zone, Open Ocean Capital, MOOR Capital. Northcap and Conor.

Besides this there were also a lot of business angels, including both those that are in the spotlight as well as those staying out of it. Hampus Jakobsson, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Göran Tollstam and Klaus Nyengaard, as well as others from all over the Nordics such as Henrik Torstensson and Erik Byrenius where present. You can view some of the featured guests here: here.

What do venture capitalists think about business angels

One of the highlights was a panel discussion with four venture capital firms present.

Participating where:

• Chrysanthos Chysanthou from Accel Partners – who invest in B2B SaaS, mainly series A rounds.
• Katja Bergman from MOOR Capital – Private investment firm from the Rovio founders. Only 6 investments so far, but because they are evergreen the feel no pressure to invest.
• Wayne Gibbins from Notion Capital – Who invest from € 0,75 M to € 50 M, but who have a sweetspot at Series A levels)
• Harry Briggs from Balderton Capital – A Europe focused VC firm, also mainly focusing on Series A rounds.

Some of the topics discussed where business angels, and how they looked at business angels roles in a startup after it has raised a series A or B round. There was no consensus, and some said that they like business angels to stay on board and provide further help and guidance, while in other circumstances early business angels cannot contribute efficiently any longer after a larger investment. It is really a focus on what is good for the startup and it’s product, that is the most important.

There we also talks about new ways to raise financing. Wayne said:

“We did B rounds with angels. We brought in startups to pitch a $ 10 million investment round, we took the lead, and filled up with angels.”

Something which he said worked remarkably well even with those sums involved.

Also, angel list and its new syndication focus was mentioned multiple times, as well as crowdfunding and the signals it sends as investment oppertunities

“We look a lot at crowd funding” said Harry

Business angels was a recurring topic in the VC panel session. That business angels can cause problems, especially if they have the wrong focus or attitude, was mentioned.

“High profile angels from big companies can be problematic” said Harry

What is meant was that they to easily have the ‘if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ perspective – that they often think their own solutions to problem they have faced before are the right ones. Which can be a misleading thought, because it is hard to judge what effects were really effective afterwords, and too easy to overestimate ones own importance.

Investment in gaming

Nikolaj at Sunstone held an talk and open discussion about investing in the gaming sector. He talked about the evolvement the gaming scene has gone thru, from big blockbusters and triple A titles, to todays apps.

“Gaming is no longer video games. Old games had a half-life of 5 days. Now gaming companies like Supercell and Rovio have stayed on top for over 24 month.”

He things gaming startups should see themselves not as games, but rather as the new Hollywood and compare themselves to the movie industry and entertainment business.

“Gaming has the ability to be the new digital entertainment”

“The nordic game scene is great at making enjoyable games. But they are not that good at building IP and characters. Disney would not buy Supercell. The people coming out of Rovio are the best bets at making the change to create strong IP and characters in the region.”

Not everyone present agreed, saying that movie and music studies also have a lot of revenue from old titles and IPs, something the gaming sector has not. Not at the moment at least.

Lessons from investments

Apart from the startups presenting, there were keynotes, panels and a fireside chat with Tim Jackson from Lean Investments. A lot of wisdom and insights were shared. Thoughts of interest for anyone who is in a startup has had an early seed or angel investment, or a Series A.

Tim shared his thoughts on investments in general, and also about learning, both from his background as a journalist, entrepreneurs and now VC. Amongst other he emphasised that as a successful entrepreneur you easily give the wrong advice, because you think what you did was the right thing, even tho it might be mostly luck and hard work that made you succeesfull.

“it’s tempting to teach others what you did was the right thing. But you actually do not know. I believe in life long learning.” was one of his wisdoms.

He also talks about being an entrepreneurs, and how he sees that now compared to before, when he was just writing about entrepreneurship for The Economist and The Financial Times:

“it’s a lot harder then most people realise”

Also shared were some advice from his current position as venture capitalist to what they are looking for. His four must haves in a startup:

“A good team, traction related to the amount of money, a big enough market and barriers to entry for others. Those are the most important. It must be a long term sustainable business, so entry barriers for competitors are important”

When asked what he thinks about pitching and if he has any tips, he emphasised that it all depends on if it is an early startup looking for a first € 100 000 angel investment or if it is a € 1 – 10 000 000 VC investment they are looking for. Depending on that the pitches require very different things.

Interviewed by Joakim Jardenberg, who now is amongst other ‘Chief of Internet’ at the city of Helsingborg, the discussion also was about public services and entrepreneurship, as Tim is on the board of UKs GDS.

“We should definitely keep an eye, and help, the public sector going into the digital age”

What is the difference between VC firms

Another topic that was discussed during the day was that it is hard to tell different VC firms apart – how do they really differentiate.

“All of us VCs say we are entrepreneurial driven, and have a product focus. So in order to see who fits your needs, you should talk to us, and ask us how we do that.“

Nikolaj also mentioned that becoming more focused, such as he himself – investing only in Open Source or gaming startups – is another way to know who is the most relevant. And it also to makes their own live simpler – one of the VCs mentioned they have last year looked at over 900 cases, but only invested in 6 – making the ratio 150:1. Something other VCs agreed with, the ratio startup to investment is very high, and takes a lot of time and focus.

Startups showcase

The startups presenting where from all over the Nordics. They were not asked to pitch, but rather showcase their businesses and present themselves. Being in fundraising mode was not a requirement to be selected – however multiple of them were. Sometimes the best time to build a relationship with an investor is when you aren’t fundraising. Therefor the aim was to seek out interesting founders with businesses operating at different stages and in different industries.

Present where:

• Brisk.io – Hampus Jakobsson told about their ambition to make people love their CRM system.
• Barnebys – making arts, antiques and collections accessible for anyone
• Mapillary – Enabling street view anywhere with mobile technology.
• Clue – Ida, about how they aim to become a mobile technological alternative to the pill for fertile women worldwide
• Safello – Ludvig Öberg about their safe approach to Bitcoin and their new wallet, including their bitcoin ATM machine
• Conferize – Jon Schäffer about how they aim to be every conference online plattform and community.
• Kahoot! – about making a tool for educations, and how they have reached a massive 4 million unique players already!
• Tinitell – About making a wristphone that kids can use, including a GPS tracker. Got a lot of attention lately for their recent kickstarter.
• Sprinkle – making a widget for suggested reading for newspapers and magazine, achieving better returns then traditional ads.
• Airhelp – how they are helping people claim delayed airplane compensation, at a remarkable level!

All in all, a very good event, with a lot of interesting people and a good crowd. Benjamin Page, Michael Hoy, and Daniel Kipowski who organised it did a great job, and we are looking forward to next year already.

The post Nordic Next – an intimate conference building investor relations appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

We catched up with him, about how his current startup, as well as insight into his thoughts on building a company.

Starting Dexplora

Knowing what his latest startup should be was a strategic decision for Hampus and his co-founder Mikael Tellhed. They wanted to be in a business where they could learn about sales – real “high velocity sales” and not the kind of “elephant hunting” they did at TAT. They were both in love with data visualisation (and had plenty of skills from their learnings at TAT in it) but didn’t know where it could be put to really valuable use. The startup became to create a tool to help salesmen in the corporate world get an better overview over their prospects and general sales insight. It got a name: Dexplora – for Data exploration.

“We wanted to create a tool that enabled salespeople to understand and easily manage all the data they had. A great looking and user friendly CRM (customer relation management).”

Pivots and micro-pivots

After a while, and the addition of two co-founders (Alfred Gunnarsson and Andreas Pålsson) and the departure of one (Henrik Been), the team realised that Dexplora was however not the best solution to the problems.

“We found that visualising the data was useless as most of the data, frankly, was crap. Salespeople did not use the CRM at all or at least not as intended.“

Dexplora pivoted to be a “data cleaning tool” – where the idea was to increase usage of the sales tools (the CRM) so that the information in it could be used to forecast, see the competitor landscape, and material to train new sales people. The new product was called GetSalesDone. For the sales person it was a task manager with a heavy focus on UX and design.

However, after building a working solution and integrating it with the CRM Salesforce, the product still was not the right one. another pivot was done – Brisk.io was created. Brisk.io still has the Salesforce integration, but this time it was a merge between Dexplora’s top-down managment focused approach and the ease of use and users from GetSalesDone. The company could now design an ideal way of working with customers and the salespeople would get a tailor made tool. The result was not just happier salesmen but better insight for management.

Naming: Dexplora -> GetSalesDone -> Brisk.io

“We just made it easy for ourselves and saw the name as any agile process. When we started the company we knew that we wanted the name of the company to be that of the product, and Dexplora was both. When we changed product to GetSalesDone, we didn’t change the name till the product had proven itself, and it didn’t. And when finally Brisk.io proved itself as product we changed the name of the company to that too.”

Lessons learned

“In the beginning we just talked to sales managers and salespeople – if I did it again today we would have structured this a lot more. I would find 10 people every day on LinkedIn or something and I would ask them what their headaches were and whatever they answered I would proceed with asking ‘why’, ‘why’, ‘why’’. And after that, ‘why’ again, till we got to the core of what the problem and its consequences.”

He recently made an excellent blogpost about this method, which goes into it in much greater details. You can read it here.

“I would have done this in combination with meeting some users that are really knowledgeable that would end up being almost advisors – for us it turned out good, with Lars Nordwall, the COO and VP Sales at Neo Technology in San Francisco, becoming one of those.”

Strength and weaknesses

When it comes to building a startup, getting the right people on board is crucial. Here Hampus had some interesting insights as well: that a person’s strength are also always the person’s weakness. When it comes to hiring and deciding who should be on what team, this was important.

“All people have skills, strengths, and weaknesses. What I have found is that mature people realise these are all the same, just different sides of the coin. A person’s strength is also their weakness. I know that I myself am very quick to reply, but that doesn’t make me the most thorough and prone to quick decisions.”

Those seeing Hampus teams in action say that it is like watching a smoothly running machine, so we take it that his efforts to build good teams has payed off.

If you want to read more of Hampus insights, he writes interesting blogpost about different details every now and then, such as the one about the ‘Asking for success’ method above, or a recent one about ‘How-do-you-feel dinners’, about how to align the core team. Insightful lessons.

The post Hampus Jakobsson on Dexplora, GetSalesDone, Brisk.io and lessons as a serial entrepreneur appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

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 Startup News.

The social photo app people (who we’ve written a bit about here already) take place number 3! Congratulations Foap!

This social life coach web site and app company was founded in 2012 by Malmö entrepreneurs Tina Yildirim, Miha Pulko and Maja Dahlin Lundbergh. InvivoPlay is the business of life improvement and positive psychology. The platform lets users take on challenges to their meet goals, guided by experts and people with valuable life experiences. It’s a movement to create a happier world – a fresh and positive initiative blending the backgrounds and passions of its founders – with tech, psychology and fun, and takes place number 12!

Dexplora, the B2B behind GetSalesDone (and TAT before that) comes in at number 21 with Brisk.io, an app service that works as interface between CRM system Salesforce and an Iphone. Sellers can update data directly by mobile. They’ve got bigger plans to make the service compatible with additional CRM systems. A very handy idea for improving usability of often-neglected CRM software products.

Stockholm cloud based 3D scanning tech company Volumental took place number one, but be sure to check out the full list for a glimpse at a lot of cool startups.

The post Sweden’s hottest digital entrepreneurs of 2013 appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

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 Startup News.

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 Startup News.

• Adrian McDermott – ZenDesk SVP
• John Taysom – one of the first investors in Yahoo!
• Carl Silbersky – founder of SettleBox
• Lars Buch – past at Nokia and now Startupbootcamp Copenhagen

GetSalesDone is, as we have reported earlier, an mobile-centric sales-support app. It integrates with Salesforce, making it the essential Salesforce app on the iPhone. The team at Dexplora, with Hampus Jakobsson, former TAT founder in the lead, has an impressive track record of intuitive and user-friendly user experience.

“The track record of the team behind Dexplora is extraordinary. After talking to some of their trial customers, we knew that they were on to something, and really look forward working with them.” says Tom Bradley, Partner at DN Capital.

How much equity the investors got in the deal the guys at Dexplora did not want to reveal, but according to Hampus the founding team still owns “a significant majority” of the shares.

“We’re thrilled to be supported by such premier investors in Creandum and DN Capital and our twelve angels. The capital will allow us to continue to develop our product offering and to prove that good design is as important for enterprise as for consumers.” Hampus commented on the deal.

The news has already been picked up by Tech Crunch and Wall Street Journal.

With this investment Dexplora and GetSalesDone is definitly one of the hottest startups in the region. We wish Hampus and the team the best of luck, and look forward to hear when the next milestone will be met!

The post GetSalesDone recieves $1.2M in seed investment appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Back in August 2012, it was reported that the duo were up to something. That something is Dexplora, and the first order of business for the new enterprise is GetSalesDone.

GetSalesDone is an enterprise software app with the sales reps in mind. It’s an app to help communicate customer demands through organisations and back to the developers. Born out of frustration with existing reporting and planning systems, Dexplora created the user-friendly ‘to-do’ list style planning and analysis tool for mobile. It is an alternative to CRM systems that can leave sales teams in a bubble – without control of the product, and unable to pass on what the customer wants to the production team.

GetSalesDone can only be paired with salesforce.com systems for now, but support for other systems is on the way. According to Jakobsson, the app will work with most corporate installations without any need for changes.

“This is just as much for us to get feedback from users” says Jakobsson.

Dexplora plans to launch a paid version later this year.

The post GetSalesDone revealed by former TAT team appeared first on Øresund Startup News.