“We have found the perfect match with JobTeaser, with whom we have been continuously talking since 2016. Due to our rapid growth, there have been many interested buyers, but no one else was as good a fit: Together we will now become the de facto market leader in Europe, and our technology for virtual job fairs is way ahead of what else is on the market.”

says Patrick Lund, CEO and co-founder of Graduateland

The acquisition will also provide better search opportunities for international talents for Danish companies and Danish students will have a better chance of being considered for employment throughout Europe.

Established in 2010, Graduateland offers a career portable for students and graduates. During Corona lockdown, the company promoted its “Virtual Career Fair” initiative, which proved to be a popular and profitable venture. In collaboration with French JobTeaser, the company will have completed access to statistics and data from over 750 universities across Europe.

Bootstrapped (almost) all the way

In contrast too many other startups in the recent years, Graduateland has never taken a larger investor on board. The only exception is for a 3.5 percent equity stake that Accelerace got in 2013.

Instead, there has always been a focus on earning the money before they were used. According to Patrick Lund, the success has been created through persistence and ability to change when the market and conditions changed. It has been an advantage not to have to discuss with an investor every time.

It has however not been without challenges. For a time, there were 40 people in the office, but the markets south of the Danish border were difficult to open up, so when the pandemic hit in 2020, the 17 remaining employees in Copenhagen focused on the Nordics.

However as new business opportunity came from the pandemic, the company grew to 45 employees, and the merger with JobTeaser and the expansion plans mean that they expect to add 25 employees over the next two years to Graduateland, which will form the Nordic office of the JobTeaser group.

In connection with the transaction, the five original founders and owners, including Patrick Lund, sell their shares, and Patrick continues as director of the Nordic department in the combined JobTeaser.

The post French JobTeaser acquires SaaS startup Graduateland appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Before Graduateland, an effective system that supported the recruitment of students and recent graduates didn’t exist. This value gap was identified by Patrick Lund and Jens Reimer and now it is a huge brand that provides superior service to great companies and talented job-seekers by covering 10 countries in Europe.  Graduateland also has two portals covering the US.

The company offers online services by connecting current university students and recent graduates with employers. Students can create profiles and upload resumes that can be looked up by employers; at the same time, employers can post new job opportunities that the students can browse through and apply when relevant. The platform has user rate of almost 500,000 and it still continues growing with the sign up rate increasing rapidly since October 2015 because of a design update.

THE FOUNDERS

In our interview with Patrick, he reveals that unlike other entrepreneurs, he never intended to create a company. Coming from a family of doctors and engineers, his idea of a successful career revolved around a good education and landing a respectable job in a well-established organization. Patrick still believed that his future laid in a conventional career choice many months after creating Graduateland.

“At some point you realize that what you’re building is actually used by students all over the world, and you find yourself at a crossroad where you have to choose between doing startup, or finishing university. Believing in our idea the choice was fairly easy, and suddenly you find your career trajectory change dramatically.”

In the beginning Patrick and Jens needed help with the launch of the product. They convinced three more people with a background in e-commerce to become a part of the startup and strengthen the team. Morten Petersen, Jonas Reeh Petersen and Jesper Reeh Petersen joined Patrick and Jens, and that led to the beginning of their startup adventure.

WHAT GRADUATELAND IS ABOUT

Getting an overview of the recruitment industry is a chaotic process, making it difficult for employers to find the right talent and job seekers to find the right path for their career.

“If you metaphorically see the recruitment process as a river, with job seekers standing on one side, and the recruiting companies on the other side, then there is currently only one bridge – the job application. We want to create more touchpoints between employers and job seekers; communication should not only be facilitated via the classical job application.”

The huge number of job applicants passing through this bridge makes it difficult to get the right match. In short, there is a lack of efficiency in the recruitment process. Graduateland’s business model aims to fix this problem. In a couple of weeks, Graduateland will be launching a new functionality where companies can ‘poke’ candidates that they find relevant, but who have not yet applied for their job ads.

“Imagine that if you’re looking for a job, and you get a poke from an employer, who encourages you to check out their job ad, you’ll be very prone to take a look.”

The strategy followed by Graduateland is to create partnerships with universities in order to help the students, while at the same time enabling companies easy access to talented students and graduates. This strategy has been successful so far and has made a powerful brand. Graduateland is considered the official career portal of universities across 10 countries.

ACHIEVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES

Strong brand identity and reputation helped Graduateland to land universities in 5 new countries during 2015; the UK, Netherlands, Ireland, Latvia and Lithuania. It is clear that the startup is getting closer to its goal of being a global company but like anyone else in the business world, companies go through challenges. The main challenge of Graduateland is to create brand awareness on a global level as there is a high level of clutter in the online world today. Despite this, they have managed a 200% increase in organic growth during last year.

“We’re working a lot on our organic growth by creating a lot of relevant content, and trying to build the very best user experience, but the market for online job searching is also crowded, so it can be challenging to catch the spotlight.”

Graduateland has clearly discovered the recipe for success in today’s competitive world, as the company has been surpassing its sales targets so far. The startup’s been growing its sales at impressive 40% annually for the last three years. The sales for the year 2015/2016 are estimated to be €2 million (15 million DKK).

FUTURE GOALS

For the future, the startup intends to stick with the plan of creating more brand awareness and reaching other European markets. Patrick is confident that they are on the right path and will achieve all their goals eventually.

“We want to win the European market, and pursuing a very online driven strategy allows us to pair a scalable product and a scalable business model with a scalable expansion strategy.”

But success of the startup is not the only thing to focus on when one looks at the big picture. It has improved the recruitment process by helping both the employers and the employees. In short, it has become a central component in the startup ecosystem and acts as a pillar that supports the recruitment industry’s foundation.

The post Spotlight on Graduateland: Insights from CEO Patrick Lund appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

If you have been active on social platforms like Twitter, you ought to seek help from a popular SEO consultant, Andy Drinkwater  who talks about how it differs from other SEO tools at both its simplicity and its freemium business mode and also provides assistance on building your business using SEO. Unlike most other similar tools, it has no trial period, after which you have to upgrade. Instead simple use of SEORanking is free – forever, check this page to learn more. It is first if you want to add more than 10 keyword that you need to upgrade. Mathias Lund is also working at Graduateland, while developing the service at web 20 ranker. But SEORanking isn’t directly linked Graduateland, though Mathias Lund created it with the startups former CTO, Morten Petersen. For SEO services click here to find out more. For better link building you can contact Freshlinks and get help from experts.

“I have been working here at Graduateland for the past 5 years and come to realise that there is a serious need for a tool like seoranking.io (you can talk to these guys for further information on the topic) in tech startups and other smaller companies. For instance Graduateland uses it for tracking how their different landing pages rank on Google, how many visitors find them through organic traffic and how many people actually stick around.”

Being surrounded by startups helped realizing that there was a real demand.

“I have been sparing a lot with a bunch of the companies in Startup Village here in Copenhagen about the way they track their SEO, and I think SEORanking occupies a sweet spot in the market. We have built our beta version with all the input from the startups we have co-created with.”

If you want to try the tool, check it out: seoranking.io

The post A tool for startups: seoranking.io appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Ontame.io is a platform that helps users to a deeper understanding for their job and career sites. It is a data-driven recruitment platform for marketing and analytics. Its goal is to enable recruiters to reduce time to hire and the cost per hire, using predictive analytics to make smarter recruitment marketing decisions.

The launch of Ontame.io has gotten a great start. But in order for ontame.io to succeed it will require a lot of focus. Therefore the two co-founders decided jointly to entrust the role of CEO of Graduateland to Patrick Lund.

And according to Jens Reimer Olesen timing could not be better.

“Graduate Land has never been stronger; we have a great team in Copenhagen and Stockholm. We are seeing large influx of people and businesses and is healthy based financial, “says Jens Reimer Olesen to Trendsonline.

With over 350,000 users using Graduateland they are ready to make their mark as the best in their field.

“We have very sound position in our core markets, and we have to consolidate our role as a ‘category king’. In addition, we have recently focused very much on the distribution of our portals, so that we really get off the ground.” says Patrick

You can read more over at Trendsonline about the change.

The post Graduateland expands with ontame.io and gets new CEO appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Above you can see the some footage of the opening ceremony, where Zenia Francker from Founders House held the inauguration talk.

Founders house is a initiative where some of the most successful startups from Copenhagen have co-located in the same block. Startup Village is located at Islands Brygge on Njalsgade, in the old pakhusen. Some of the startups have had their offices there for a while already, but with the latest startups moving there the idea of branding it as Startup Village was born.

The houses are 4 old warehouses remodeled by a local floor marking contractor, with some startups having smaller spaces and some entire floors. It is a distinct historical area with great flavour and both indoor as well as outdoor locations.

Entrepreneurial initiative

Behind the initiative are the different startups, with Founders House moving there being one of the driving factors. It is a completly private initiative, with the aim of helping all startups located in the village. Somewhat ironically, the business department of the Copenhagen Municipallity actually had their offices just next door, until they moved to a new location, this summer.

Startups present

Some of the biggest startups present in the Startup Village are:

• Autobutler
• Bellmetric
• Churchweb
• Conferize
• Everplace
• Graduateland
• Labster
• Nabby
• Opbeat
• Planday
• Riidr
• Realm
• Shape
• Vivino

With the Founders House co-working space there are also a larger number of smaller and newer startups present.

Not just startups

The village also includes a café and a restaurant, as well as a Yoga center. Some ‘regular’ companies are present on the premises as well, such as White Arcitects office, as the this has rather been a gradual growing conglomeration of startups and not a top-down planned takeover, such as Berlin Factory. The idea is however to enable further startups to move there, with the assistance of a service like business moving services, as soon as floor-space becomes available.

The post Startup Village officially opened – #svlaunch appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

The new location, at Islands Brygge, will thus form a new innovative tech hub – dubbed the Startup Village Copenhagen.

Old warehouses turned into startups heaven

Islands Brygge’s historic warehouses marked by experts you can aslo hire if you click here used to be the headquarters of FDB, who stored and transported products to all of Denmark via direct tracks to Copenhagen Harbor. In recent years, the area has increasingly become the home of tech startups, and now that is accelerated. As of this summer, the area in Njalsgade will be the frame around Copenhagen’s biggest concentration of fast-growing startups, including the estabished startups Vivino, Opbeat, Graduateland and Autobutler, as well as over 15 other both early and later stage startups!

A real hub for startups

Having all these ambitious startups with offices side by side increase knowledge-sharing and in turn speeds up growth of the individual companies. All serious tech startups are welcome, both to take up offices at Njalsgade, now called Startup Village, and to join the many tech events and social stuff arranged so people can network, do business and have fun. Founders House will with it’s move also expand, so talk to them if you are a smaller startup and want to be part of their co-working area.

A grass-roots initiative

The entire idea behind the Startup Village comes from the community itself. In contrast to many other projects, this is not a government sponsored place or initiative, but rater it is the different startups realizing that they could create an area that they would love themselves. This is a similar trend seen elsewhere, with Berlins Factory (also to be opened this summer) being a similar initiative.

With both the established startups being there, and Founders House with its often earlier stage startups as well as smaller startups in their own offices, the Village will be a space for both startups that are just getting going, as well as later stage ones that have raised a successful series A or even a series B investment. The Village will also be a natural place for international startups establishing a Scandinavian presence to be located – something that already is apperent on the list of the initial startups forming the Startup Village!

All in all, a great step for the community to have that much knowledge in one place!

Startups present

The spaces are being put in shape now, and the inaugurations is set for the 29th of August. The following startups have said will be part of the Startup Village CPH when it starts:

• Shape
• Vivino
• Conferize
• Opbeat
• Graduateland
• Birdback
• Nabby
• TightDB
• Boligsurf
• Anker Studio
• Everplaces
• Kirkeweb
• Codeable.io
• HelloWorldMobile
• Labster
• BodyBarista
• MeeWee
• Riidr
• Pinstriped
• Pocket Risk
• SNIPS
• 8pen
• Bellmetric
• Autobutler
• Planday
• Hello Monday
• Driversnote

The post Copenhagen Startup Village revealed! 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.

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.

Trendsonline reports that prior to the investment Graduateland had long negotiation with both other investment-funds and angel investors, but they ended up with Accelerace, which could commit to the right terms and conditions.

“We are the proud and very happy that Accelerace has chosen to invest in us. Their help means that we can accelerate our product and service development.” says Jens Reimer Olesen, CEO, to Trendsonline.dk

Graduateland has been one of the successful startups in the last couple of years, and have until now been bootstrapped and managed without any real* outside investments.

“Graduateland is the startup in Accelerace’s history that has managed to come the furthest by it’s own means. They had a strong focus on building a successful sales organisation from the start, something other startups can learn from. With this setup they don’t have to prove to us investors that they can achieve sales, but rather how much sales!” says Jesper Knudsen to Trendsonline.dk

Speculations are that the strong sales process and success without funding made the negotions with potential VCs and angels longer, as the valuation is usually harder to estimate when a startup already has substancial revenue.

Accelerace is one of the most active investors in this region, having by itself or together with others (usually SEED Capital) also invested in companies such as Bownty, The Eye Tribe and Conferize.

*Only investment listed is a small (€15K) on their CrunchBase profile, which most likely just is the basic investment when starting up the company.

The post Graduateland receives investment by Accelerace appeared first on Øresund Startup News.