The fund is, as the name suggest, focused on being backed by founders. This is an impressive list, with founders behind local successes like Zendesk, Unity, Tradeshift, Sitecore and Vivino being a part of it. But also founders from across the nordics, with successes such as Skype and Kahoot. And the idea is to leverage those founders as well for the startups that will be invested in:

“byFounders provides early-stage founders with unrivalled access to knowledge, expertise and insight from some of the most successful Nordic entrepreneurs. The support and operational guidance available from such a broad group is unique, and has the potential to play a major factor in the success of the next generation of startups from the region.” says Morten Primdahl, Co-Founder of Zendesk, about the process

The idea is to help out with what is needed for further growth. That can be scaling, introductions, referrals, recruiting, global expansion or raising further funding rounds. Portfolio startups are supposed to always find the advice they need in the 50-strong and growing ‘Collective’.

“byFounders Collective allows me to take part in shaping the founders of the future and highlighting the innovative and un-traditional companies that dare to think different and proves that the way to success doesn’t have to include a basement or a White Party.” says Frederikke Schmidt, founder of Roccamore

The fund will invest in a different range of startups. The strategy for investing has so far been a “7 T:s” approach: Team, TAM, Traction, Tech, Transformation, Timing, 10x.

However, raising a lot of money for investing in startups is not the easiest process.

“Having been through a challenging, exciting, at times gruelling and at the end very successful fundraising period, we can now proudly announce that we have managed to reach our goal of raising a € 100 million fund. For a first-time fund, this is exceptional.” Ida Åsle says about the process.

byFounders will be very important for our region, being a major VC player located here, that can compete with the other big Nordic funds such as Creandum and Northzone, based in Stockholm. An important player in the Greater Copenhagen eco-system for sure, but also strengthening the Nordics in total.

“It’s natural for every tech ecosystem to compare itself to Silicon Valley but the Nordics have established itself as a true birthplace for unicorns. The region can and will compete with any other place in the world when it comes to fostering and growing companies, and I believe the opportunity for large exits will only increase over time.” says Tommy Andersen who together with Eric Lagier started the fund.

byFounders has already invested in 11 startups: Corti, Peergrade, Simple Feast, Cobalt, Spiio, SafetyWing, Drugstars, Omnio, Qurasense, Tame, and Uizard.

You can read more about the process from byFounders directly, or at TechCrunch and Tech.eu as well.

The post A new VC is in town! appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Tradeshift
The biggest recent one was of course Tradeshift. The first FinTech startup that has reached “unicorn” status, being valued at over $ 1 billion! Tradeshift is based in Copenhagen and it received over € 212 million from Goldman Sachs, as well as a number of other investors. You can read a lot more about that at TechCrunch and a host of other sources as well.

“We have always believed that the future of supply chains is 100 percent digital and that connecting trade is just the first step to a digitally connected economy. This investment will enable us to continue our rapid growth and consolidate our leadership position.”

– is one of co-founder Christian Lanng’s many comments on this. Impressive work building the company to this stage.

Ear Labs
Ear Labs, a Copenhagen / Malmö-based company that produces ear phones and ear plugs, has received over € 650.000. The Ear Labs’ team has created ear plugs that protect ears underwater. Now they are working on ear plugs that could be used in nightclubs and other noisy environments. The project was founded by Swedens Almi Invest and other investors in Denmark and China.

Ann-Sofie Hörlin, Investment Manager på Almi Invest, commented their recent investment:

“Ear Labs has developed a unique product with many uses in a scalable market. They work in a competitive area, but with their sharp team and a product in front edge, we see big potential for the company.”

Fieldly
Fieldly, has reported an investment of € 1.22 million. Fieldly provides digital project management systems for construction businesses. Their product makes communication between building companies and construction sites easier. Time reports, material usage and deliveries can be reported directly in the smartphone or tablet app. The biggest investment came from Roland Zeller, a Swiss business angel, as well as angels Christer Dahlén, Dan Nilsson and Mårten Öbrink.

Fieldly’s co-founder, Daniel Krusenstråhle, said:

“We have spent our first four years proving that we operate well with small and medium-sized companies. Now we have reached the point when we feel that our product is ready for bigger challenges and so is our organisation.”

With the investment the startup also announced they moved into bigger offices in Malmö.

Pleo
As we already reported, another fintech investment that happened in the region was Pleo, raising the biggest Series A investment so far in the region. The funding of € 13 million will be used to grow outside the startups initial focused cities, and bring it’s services and it’s special employee credit card to more markets.

Nikka Systems
A lesser known startup that recieved investments in May was Nikka Systems, a Malmö based statup focusing on education about IT security. The company received funds from Kjell & Company’s co-founder, Marcus Dahnelius.

“You can see that there is a big need for IT security in companies of all sizes. We are already getting request for our products, before they have been launched” says Marcus Dahnelius.

Tame
Another funding we have already covered, that was announced this month, was Tame. The event planning startup has been under the radar until now, but has a strong team and impressive angels backing it. The startup raised € 450.000 in it’s first round.

Undo
A Copenhagen-based startup Undo has received over € 3.3 million from Tryg. Undo has developed an app, which will let you get a custom-made insurance in just a few minutes. At the moment, their target audience is young people up to mid-30s, who do not know much about insurance whatsoever.

“To get an insurance is complicated and it takes a long time, and many are afraid of the process, because they cannot really understand what they buy and at the same time they get stuck with long binding time and huge cancellation fees. Almost all insurance services operate with a fixed package, but it can consist of many coverings you do not need, With us you choose only the necessary things, and you pay per month, no fees or binding time”, explains Sophie Bohr Grønbæk, co-founder of Undo.

Now Undo opens innovative insurance solutions for people in Copenhagen and Aarhus, planning to extend to other Scandinavian and European cities too.

Uizard
And finally, Uizard, a startup from Copenhagen raised € 670.000. The startup turns a wire-frame or mock-up into a source code, so the designer and developer workflow is improved and less time is spent on writing a code from scratch.

Read more over at these places: TechCrunch (about Tradeshift), Oresundstartup (about Pleo), TechCrunch (about Uizard) , TechSavvy, Breakit, Digital.

The post Latest investments in the region (May 2018) appeared first on Øresund Startups.

David Helgason, founder of Unity, told an interested audience how the company was one of the first to fully benefit from the smartphone revolution, where you suddenly could access 2 billion consumers though an inexpensive and efficient channel.

Delivering a game engine used by a third of all mobile games publishers has made their software get onto more than 2 billion handsets.

A key factor in their success was the timing, but also that they moved to Silicon Valley and lived the “Silicon Valley Playbook” by going freemium at a time when that was not at all common.

Unity’s pricing model where they made it easier and cheaper to buy their software compared to the competition was also key to success.

Your business model determines your destiny!

Your business model is what makes you scalable, it’s the denominator of whether you are successful or not: If your business model is not good enough and you try to scale, you will fail. Lose money, implode.
If you have the right business model you can scale. Then it makes sense to fuel your growth with venture capital.
Listening to six founders who got it right was inspiring, when each of them took the stage at the Nordic Growth Hackers #7 on January 25th at Founders House in Copenhagen.

Siteimprove cracked onboarding

Waiting 12 years before taking in any external funding secured full control of the company, explained Siteimprove founder, Morten Ebbesen. And he stresses that full control is essential to early growth.
But some things cannot be controlled – and sometimes love overrules your business plan:
A Danish VP of Siteimprove fell in love with a Minneapolis resident. Now they have two kids and he’s managing 150 people – in Minneapolis. This proved to be less expensive than the two typically preferred cities for startups going to the US – San Francisco and New York .

SiteImprove has added more than 100 salespeople over the past year. The only way to do that is by onboarding in an extremely structured way. Hiring an external recruiter to take care of the full process of hiring and onboarding has proven very successful, reducing churn and improving sales performance.

Know your customers

Penneo’s greatest growth hack was to change from a free-signup-and-pay-per-use model to a prepaid subscription. That took the two year-old company from 0 to 10 million DKK in revenue.

If you’re planning to sell different kinds of soap products in the future, keep in mind that custom soap boxes are very creative and a great tool for marketing.

Along the same lines, Iconfinder found out that they had a wrong idea about how their customers paid for their service. Designers & developers rarely have a company credit card, so the model of paying separately per icon download really held their users back. Switching to a monthly subscription with (almost) unlimited downloads made their revenue skyrocket.

No more awkward board meetings looking at 0-growth. Or at least not that awkward, Martin LeBlanc Eigtved of Iconfinder added. The board didn’t allow him to rest on his laurels but asked for even more growth: True growth hacking mindset!

Tradeshift is about democratizing business. Kind of a bold vision, but constantly repeating this big, hairy, audacious goal was what propelled the six year-old company into many Fortune 500 companies and made it sensible for them to host their own events at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos.
Control your key revenue drivers

Tactile Entertainment is a game studio delivering very visually appealing mobile games, primarily in the categories “endless runner” and “casual puzzles”.

Asbjørn Søndergaard, Founder & CEO told that initially they left the marketing and monetization via in-app ads to a third party, but things never really took off. When they developed their own marketing platform instead and took back the whole process, revenue started to grow exponentially.
Lesson: Make sure you control your key revenue drivers.

NGH#8 in March or April

The next Nordic Growth Hackers will be in March or April, according to the organizers and initiators behind the Nordic Growth Hackers community, SimpleSite.

Follow the NGH community here: nordicgrowthhackers.com
Twitter: @nordicgrowth

The post Nordic Growth Hackers #7: Your business model is constantly evolving appeared first on Øresund Startups.

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 Startups.

Previsouly Tradeshift has already expanded to the UK, US and China. They have earlier raised $37 million in venture funding from Notion Capital, Ru-net, Kite Ventures, Intuit, and PayPal.

“It is in the DNA of our company to do things organically and on a global scale, from developing software to developing our business – In 2013 we established offices in Suzhou, China to build supplier centric applications for the platform.” CEO Christain Lanng says

Scentan will help out on the strategic side, giving Tradeshift a hand with recruiting and product development for the local market. In exchange, Tradeshift will offer Scentan exclusive rights to product development, sales marketing, and servicing the Tradeshift platform in Japan.

“We spent a lot of time determining who the best partner would be to move Tradeshift to the next level, not just with regard to our funding, but also our global expansion strategy. Scentan Ventures has a clear understanding of our vision, and is aligned with our ambition to connect every business on the planet on one shared, open platform. Couple this with Japan’s appetite for change and innovation, and their ranking as the world’s third largest economy, and the decision was made easy. We are excited to have Scentan Ventures by our side as we enter this next exciting chapter.” Christan says.

The news is covered by various sources, and you can read more over at CNN and Trendsonline, a deeper insight over at Spend Matters, as well as Christians blogpost about it.

This is the biggest investment into a Copenhagen based startup since we have started this site, even beating Zendesks $ 60 million in 2012. Great work by the team!

The post Tradeshift gets massive €55 million investment! 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.

DHL GBS has hopped onboard the Tradeshift platform for e-business, along with the early users, Danish transportation and logistics company DSV; and Kuehne+Nagel that joined in 2012 to manage their 8 million or so annual invoices. The example shows there is industry-wide consensus on Tradeshift to simplify business relationships, with major actors interacting with buyers and tens of thousands of other suppliers already connected.

“This has never happened before — and that’s because Tradeshift is different”, says Lanng

Suppliers and buyers are choosing to join the same open platform to save time, simplify invoicing and accounts, and create connections. With more businesses supported by more products in Tradeshift, such as large US and UK accounting software partnerships reported earlier this year, other industries are set to follow. There is the Strader Ferris International offering logistics services that one can opt for as they provide the best services as well.

“Today’s news is just further proof that this is something the world is crying out for.” – Tradeshift CEO Christian Lanng

The post Global Logistics Industry ‘Tradeshift-ed’ appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Tradeshift has been an active and open follower of the lean startup management philosophy, and this is another way of giving to the community. With lean startups emphasis on learning and testing, the A/B testing software will be put to good use. The tool will be hosted on github and be freely aviable. Read more on Tradeshifts blog.

The post Tradeshift open-sourcing AB testing tool appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Tradeshift has itself said they are incorporating facebook-like features such as comments in their business software, all this with the aim of allowing businesses

“more time to get on with the work that matters,” – says Christian Lanng, CEO, to The Next Web.

Tradeshift is a company in the bullish B2B market, especially the “enterprise 2.0” market, where user-friendly and easy-to-use software have taken alot of space lately – something that we have been good at in this region, with both Podio and Zendesk leading the way.

The post Tradeshift adds support for UK accounting services appeared first on Øresund Startups.

CEO Christian Lanng hopes that this will enable the company to reach the critical mass to be the largets service provider in business interaction.

“…when it [a service] reaches a point where it includes most of the businesses you want to interact with, something amazing happens. Skype, Facebook, Linkedin; all these platforms are successful because they have critical mass.”

– Christian says in the blogpost that announced the deal.

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