Founded in Denmark in 2010, Vivino app allows users to track the wines they’ve tried, rate and comment them and recommend wines to users. 

The investment will be helping the company improve its core technology and artificial intelligence platform to create better and more personalised recommendation for Vivino users. It will also deepen its focus on the expansion of the select markets in the USA, Germany and Great Britain. 

“Vivino’s addressable market is gigantic and the company has taken the position as the obvious choice for wine consumers worldwide. They have created a strong network and have access to large amounts of data with 1.5 billion scanned wines since the start “, says Kinnevik CEO Georgi Ganev.

Update: we mistakenly wrote €58 million in the first publication of this article. This was as mistake, we apologize.

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• Symphogen
• Trustpilot
• Pleo
• Vivino
• Peakon
• Planday
• SNIPR Biome
• Simple Feast
• Blackwood Seven

These startup have together raised over € 1 billion in funding since being started, and are emerging as the most important tech companies in Denmark.

We have talked a bit extra with one of them, Planday. Besides being listed on this list, Planday has an impressive list of being selected as one of the 100 best Copenhagen start-ups to watch and work for in 2019, and top 100 SaaS companies from Europe – amongst many other shortlists.

We talked with Anders Frederiksen, co-founder of Planday, about them being selected one of the most important startups in Denmark

“It is an exciting acknowledgement of our progress,. This recognition is thanks to the hard work and dedication of our people in Copenhagen and in our offices throughout Europe and North America who are always looking for new ways to optimise the work we do.”

Planday was originally founded as a way to save time for managers with scheduling staff, but has since grown international.

“When we started in a Danish bar 16 years ago we set out to save people time and money and work smarter, not harder. Now, we have thousands of businesses around the world which use Planday. Last year we celebrated passing more than 100 million shifts created in the Planday platform.”

Being in Copenhagen and part of the thriving tech scene, has definitely helped the startup succeed.

“We are really proud to still call Copenhagen home and want to continue to bring the best of Scandinavian innovation and design together to enable shift-workers and the businesses which employ them around the world to work smarter. While we continue to scale and follow our ambitions to power even more people and businesses to work smarter, it is great to be part of an awesome tech community that also helps support that vision.”

You can read more about the shortlist here.

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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.

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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.

“Heini and Theis have managed to take over the world of wine. Not only do they have a very active user base that explores more than two million wines a day, they also sell wine now. In the US alone, you can buy more than 130.000 different kinds of wine.” SEED Capital states.

Vivino’s has grown not just in users, but also in sales. It is reported that it’s marketplace sales in December 2017 were four times that of the previous December, fueled by growth in existing markets as well as the addition of six new markets.

The series C investment brings Vivino’s total funding to €46 million since it was founded in 2010. It will enable the startup to continue to develop technology that delivers a seamless multi-channel commerce experience, and to further invest in its team. Vivino will also extend commerce initiatives to new markets like Hong Kong. The goal is ambitious: selling $1 billion of wine by 2020.

SEED Capital contributed to the round along with Balderton Capital, Creandum and Iconical, who all are existing investors in Vivino.

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As the last couple of times the Town Hall was held at KPH Volume – a rough and atmospheric venue. Even if very cold this particular day – the room was still packed and the audience listened vividly.

“Always be sober when talking to journalists”

Both keynotes held at the event contained a lot of stories and experiences. Especially Peter Holten Mühlmanns humorist but honest and insightful talk contained many gems, on everything from how Trustpilot got started, what value PR and being on the national front-page gives you, how to recruit smart and how to manage scaling a startup from 1 to 500+.

Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen from Balderton Capital shared his past, how it came he worked at Dropbox and Uber, and his outlook of the European and especially Danish startup scene from his current position with Balderton.

Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen talking on stage

Startups and community

As previously a part of the event was focused at highlighting startups that are of interest, as well as community events. The startups presenting on stage where:

• Linkfire – Ricki Mae Melchior
• Sponsta – Philip Bock
• Peakon – Kasper Hulthin (who also just announced a large early funding)
• Vivino – Theis Søndergaard

One the community side, the following initiatives / meetups / events got some time in the spotligt:

• Codher – A tech meetup aiming at getting more women to code
• Startup Weekend – was presented by Aleksander Bordvik
• Nordic Startup Award – Kim Balle talked about the upcoming awards
• Nordic Startup Conference – the conference is to return, and date and location announced
• Startup Europe Week – a lot of things happening the week of 1-5th february
• Singularity U Copenhagen & Danske Ideer – Henrik Føhns presented the upcoming session with Singularity University in Copenhagen

You can see further details on the videos below. Apart from these initiatives, there where also mini sessions afterwards where people could go to focus on certain topics. These were: AIESEC, Nordic Growth Hackers, Capital2Grow, LEO Ventures, CPH Coworking Council, Startup Weekend. This gave rise to a lot of discussions and people getting to know each other.

Overall a really great meetup. Great work by Christoffer and the dedicated team organising this high value event. Only drawback with the entire event was that it was kind of (very) cold – but as Nick Hawtin put it on twitter:

You gotta know your event rocks, if people are willing to sit wearing coats, hats, and mittens to hear your speakers #cphftw Town Hall.

— Nicholas Hawtin (@RiskContainment) January 21, 2016

Remaining videos

Startup session

Community session

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The investment will be focusing on taking Vivino to the world’s top wine consumption regions: the U.S., Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, and Germany. The startup currently counts 13 million users across 228 countries – with the ambitions to reach 25 million during 2016, according to VentureBeat.

“Our mission to help people all around the world find great wine requires significant resources across the wine and technology industries. Thanks to the incredible investment and insights of Christophe Navarre, we’re incredibly well-suited to continue to attack our mission in unprecedented fashion.” said Heini Zachariassen, CEO

While Vivino has focused on the key wine-drinking regions, it will also continue to expand into new and emerging market: both Mexico, Brazil, Portugal, and Canada are said to be of large interest. Vivino has also been sharing insights with other startups in the region about how they work with user retention and growth hacking – if you want to know more, we recommend Christos Iosifidis, Senior Product Manager at Vivino and his talk from Nordic Growth Hackers.

Vivino has previously raised money from Balderton Capital, Creandum and SEED Capital. This round makes it one of the most funded startups in this region!

A lot of media has already covered the investment, and you can read more at:

• VentureBeat
• Tech.eu
• Marketwired

The post Moet Hennessey’s CEO leads $23M round in Vivino appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Every wine is equipped with rating based on Vivino’s users’ reviews. And on top of that each store has an iPad with Vivino app where consumers can read additional information about individual wine. Co-operation is so far tried by five Netto stores in Denmark. But in case of success, the plan is to spread the concept to all Netto stores in Europe.

“Many customers find it difficult to buy wine in the sotre. With this partnership, we give them access to other consumers’ reviews of our wine selection. Our experience shows that it is exactly this kind of information that is demanded by the customers more and more nowadays,” says marketing manager in Netto, Martin Hasgard Olesen, to the Food Watch.

So far, the service is free for both Netto and Vivino. In the long term, the hope is to offer the service to other, especially foreign, supermarkets possibly for a service fee.

“Right now we are working towards promotion of the service but in the future this might become a businenss segment. We have many supermarkets in France, Britain and the United States who have already approached us, and if the concept works in Denmark, they could have a similar setup for one or another form of payment,” says Heini Zachariassen to Food Watch, founder and CEO at Vivino.

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“I didn’t plan to change workplace. It’s been really good being an investor where one can get inspired at conferences and on boards. But I was simply too tempted by the opportunity to dive into the issues – and not just sit on the sidelines” says Jakob Ekkelund.

Templafy provides a template management system for companies: all business documents in a company will be uniform. In 2014, Templafy received investments from both SEED Capital and Sundstone Capital. Ekkelund has invested in the company too. Last summer he invested € 1,7 millions and took place in the board. During this time, Ekkelund says he has been impressed by the professionalism of Templafy.

“They are experienced entrepreneurs who know the industry. Several of them have 10 years experience of skabelondesign.dk. They are very talented at what they do. Instead of throwing out aimlessly into something, they stop and think about it before. I’m sure Templafy can be a great success if implemented correctly – and I want to be a part of that” says Jakob Ekkelund.

Previously, Ekkelund worked for the phone company TDC. He has also been a board member of Bownty, Mofibo and Vivino and been a partner in the company Designfirmaet.

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€ 32 million profit

The venture industry has been through some trials and tribulations, and the development of SEED Capital’s funds are not to be underappreciated. The accounts for Fund 2 has a bonus of € 32 millions (237 million DKK) on the bottom line in 2014, making this the third consecutive year of positive results. The portfolio includes startups like of Vivino, Reapplix, Trustpilot and, the latest addition, Mofibo. There are several exits in sight and many of the companies are making good progress, with Galecto Biotech having entered into an agreement with Brystol-Myers Squibb, which has a potential value of € 335 million. If followed through, we will likely see the effect of this agreement on the 2015 reports.

So what is the secret behind SEED Capital’s seemingly consistent choice of winners? According to managing partner, Ulla Brockenhuus-Schack, it involves strategic thinking and some amount of risk-taking.

“Venture is hard, takes time and patient investors. Portfolio-focused thinking is essential in this game and it is important to understand that you have to launch many ships as it is not easy to predict which ones will end up being a success, “she says.

With numbers like these, what big plans does SEED Capital have in store for 2015?

“The whole venture capital industry has gone through a long learning curve over the last 10 years… We have become better at spotting winning companies and today our investments are made somewhat closer to the market than in 2005. I have great expectations for our second fund and believe that it will deliver excellent returns for our investors.” says Brockenhuus-Schack.

Public and private money

SEED Capital is not without some controversy. It’s mixture of public and private money, say some are giving it incentives not aligned with the rest of the VC community. However, the fund has shown good progress over the years.

SEED Capital has a strong partnership with the government funded innovation incubator Pre-Seed Innovation and they are able to invest € 250 000 – 750 000 at the early stages of a startups development, allowing a startup an opportunity to prove their technology and business. Depending on capital need, SEED Capital can then later invest up to € 9 million in the upcoming rounds – preferably in syndication with international investors.

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