Celebrating entrepreneurship

The Entrepreneur Gala is the yearly initiative of Founder Alliance, an entrepreneur-network run by 600 members – consisting of 3,000 companies with over 250,000 employees. Regional ceremonies are held in Stockholm, Umeå, Gothenburg and Malmö, while the cumulative, national event also takes place in Stockholm. The occasion promotes an innovative community and provides a wonderful opportunity for both distinguished entrepreneurs and those relatively new on the startup scene to meet one another. The gala’s main goal is to recognize the exceptional work of particularly ambitious individuals, like Jacob, by awarding them with titles such as ‘Founder of the Year’, ‘Entrepreneurial RoleModel of the Year’ or ‘Startup Business of the Year’. Think of it as the Oscars of the Business scene: but smaller, Swedish and with presumably less emphasis on designer labels (although the guests and winners did look very sharp!)

Jacob Lönroth

The award of ‘Young Entrepreneur of the Year’ is granted to a promising individual, under the age of 30, who operates one or several firms producing sales of at least 100,000 SEK (11,290 Euro). If you aspire your company to earn just as much or even better, you can rely on services such as domiciliation société à son domicile.

Jacob plays an active role in the startup scene, as both an investor and founder. He is involved in software investment firm Revolt Invest and speedy pharmaceutical product supplier Snabboteket. His achievement is undoubtedly well deserved.

“I am incredible honoured to have been voted the winner of southern Sweden’s leading entrepreneurs. I feel more psyched than ever to run the company and to start more businesses.” Jacob Lönroth

Make sure to watch this space for more news on Jacob Lönroth, one of Sweden’s hottest entrepreneurs.

The post TopVisible Founder Jacob Lönroth hailed ‘Young Entrepreneur of the South’ 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.

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 grant was one of 130 applications to Vinnova, and one of the few that made it through.

“It is a great honor to be the winner among so many talented companies. This will enable us to launch very interesting software that will make it easier for everyone working in digital marketing.” says Fredrik Lethin, CEO of TopVisible.

This is actually the second funding by Vinnova TopVisible has recieved – in november 2012 they got 33 000 euro for the first software development as well.

If you want to know more about Vinnovas grants and possibilites visit their site (guidelines available both in Swedish and English). More about this story can be found over at ehandel.se.

The post TopVisible recieves goverment funding appeared first on Øresund Startups.

The investments is in the six digits euro size, and comes from private investors. The aim with the investment is to grow the consultancy bigger, but also to add new services and expand the market with SEO software.

“There is currently few good SEO softwares with an international focus. We plan on changing that.” says Jacob Lönroth, one of the co-founders and CTO.

The SEO test was the first type of software that is already available. Two more services will be released soon, with the first one being a rank checker named RankTrail, a tool for keeping track of webistes rankings.

The goal is to establish the software services within this years end, and to expand them to other european markets as soon as possible.

“This is a very exciting time, and with our great team and past experiences, we really think we are in a good position to become one of the main Internet marketing softwares in Europe in the next few years.” says Magnus Äng, co-founder and with a past at SkickaTårta.se and EuroFlorist.com.

The company recently announced that they had hired Fredrik Lethin from Yves Rocher as their new CEO. With this round of funding a new era in the company seems to have begun, expanding from an experienced consultancy to a software startup.

If you’re looking for the best seo company that will help you boost your revenue through digital marketing efforts, visit Indexsy’s website. You can also look into hiring SEO Companies Newcastle.

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