Nordic VC Creandum Closes Its New €135M Fund Targeting 25-30 Seed To Series A Investments

More VC money sloshing around Europe. Creandum, the Stockholm-based VC best known for its early investments in the likes of Spotify and Videoplaza, has closed its third fund at €135 million (~$177m), laying claim to being the biggest technology venture capital fund in the Nordics.

The new fund, which was a year in the making and has already made around six investments, will target 25-30 early stage companies in the Nordics and wider European region, with a mixture of seed (€100k – 1m) and A-rounds (€1m – 10m). The majority of those will be in consumer and other software companies, with the rest being hardware and high-tech investments.

Maybe Europe’s Series A crunch — if there is such a thing — just got a little softer.

Creandum says the new fund was raised with “strong support from existing and new investors from the Nordics, rest of Europe and the US”, and that the number of Limited Partners doubled versus the previous €80m Creandum fund raised in 2007.

Interestingly, Unquote reports that only one investor from Fund II “did not re-up into Creandum III”, and that the new fund comprises 11 investors, with “approximately 50% of the capital coming from Sweden and the rest from elsewhere in Europe”. One of those investors is the Finnish government investment vehicle Finnish Industry Investment, which put in €7.5m. More generally, they are made up of family offices, and institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies.

Already active for a year, Creandum’s early investments from the new fund include the computer vision startup 13th Lab, mobile wine app Vivino, the price comparison service for sea freight Xeneta, last-minute hotel booking app JustBook and Singapore-based gaming company Non Stop Games — with a 6th Swedish investment yet unannounced.

I’m told that this accounts for no more than 10% of the new fund, with up to 24 more investments to go. Meanwhile, the VC says that 5 out of its first 6 deals have been seed investments.