Today’s startup investment trends for top Nordic VCs

In the last week, VC firms based in the Nordics announced €1.2 billion in fresh funds to invest.

Nordic entrepreneurs are a constant presence, whether they’re based in their home region, in the U.S, or the U.K. Northern Europe has deep roots in gaming, graphics, music, and communications technology that has helped raise giants like Unity, King, Mojang, Supercell, Spotify, Skype, Rovio, Paradox Interactive, Truecaller and Kobalt.

But the ecosystem’s strength has expanded substantially outside those fields, particularly with fintech unicorns like iZettle, Klarna, and Bambora, customer service software platform Zendesk, and others. 

Because SLUSH, the region’s largest startup conference, is taking place in Helsinki this week, I asked several Nordics-focused VCs to share which startup trends they’re most excited about:

  • Marta Sjögren, Northzone
  • Fredrik Cassel, Creandum Ventures
  • Neil Murray, Nordic Web Ventures
  • Louise Samet, Blossom Capital
  • Jimmy Fussing Nielsen, Heartcore Capital 
  • Hjalmar Winbladh, EQT Ventures
  • Lina Wenner, firstminute Capital
  • Tommy Andersen, byFounders
  • Ari Helgason, Index Ventures
  • Magda Lukaszewicz, Balderton Capital
  • Christian Jantzen, Futuristic.vc

Aside from gaming, digital health and fintech were standout areas of interest. Here are their individual responses:

Marta Sjögren (Northzone)

Healthtech: The next wave of healthtech will see the creation of some very valuable companies that are saving costs to society by rewriting the narrative of the patient experience, from diagnosis to treatment of chronic conditions, with outcomes-based data that will over time disrupt money-flows in healthcare (showing a clear ROI).  This is a huge opportunity as the current system just does not cater to an aging population. I am especially excited to apply this thesis to mental health, diabetes, and age-related conditions.

PeopleTech (aka HRtech+productivity): I am very excited about productivity gains we will see as remote-first working environments come to market. The constant growth of project-based, gig-economy type of professional relationships will also see the rise of a productivity suite for this audience. Companion-apps for micro-entrepreneurs that cater to both private and business needs of “making it work.” Some verticalization of productivity tech [is] already starting to take place.

Fredrik Cassel (Creandum Ventures)

I’m most excited about products and services whose growth is not dependent on (under)performance marketing, massive spend based on some marginally favorable CAC/LTV comparison but ones that grow thanks to incredible user love and ambassadorship. Both with consumer users (like Depop) and with business users (like Shapr3d). Also, I’d love to meet entrepreneurs who consciously weigh their growth versus users’ privacy as well as versus profitability of their present unit economics.

Neil Murray (Nordic Web Ventures)

As someone who is investing first money in the Nordics, I tend to be pretty vertical agnostic and I focus heavily on founding teams instead. One trend I’m particularly excited about in this regard is that we are now seeing early employees at companies like Unity, Klarna, iZettle, Spotify, Trustpilot, etc. start their own companies, providing the Nordics with a new generation of entrepreneurs who’ve already been passengers on a scaling journey once and are now keen to take the wheel themselves.

Stockholm is definitely a large beneficiary of this trend as most of the biggest companies have been built there, however, it’s also worth noting that companies who may not be “unicorns” but are still successful companies in their own right are also contributing to this, for example, I’ve recently invested in a couple of companies whose founders had been executives at Trustpilot in Copenhagen.

Louise Samet (Blossom Capital)

I’m specifically excited about the global opportunity in B2B fintech. While there’s been a lot of focus on consumer fintech products, there’s still a huge opportunity in B2B payments, banking, insurance, etc. Companies like Pleo are growing extremely fast and others are following.

In the Nordics, we’re starting to see big waves of experienced operators coming out of successful companies and bringing a wealth of experience at scale. They’re significantly strengthening the startup ecosystem by becoming founders, early employees and angel investors, fueling the next wave of unicorns.

Jimmy Fussing Nielsen (Heartcore Capital)

I’m currently zooming in on two themes:

1) “Become your own financial advisor” — most consumers rely on ‘expert’ financial advisors when making important financial decisions like retirement planning, investment management, health- and life insurance and mortgage. In many instances, the advice rendered is opaque and the ‘expert’ advisor is incentivized to sell products or services from which their organization profits. The consumer could be better off by using a self-service, tech-enabled financial solution that’s lower cost and more transparent. I have written about retirement savings here and invested in the pension start-up Grandhood and real-estate investment platform Exporo.

2) “Decoupled financial decisions in the rent economy” — Consumers favor access over ownership and for the two largest consumer spending categories — transportation and housing — this is increasingly true. As a consumer-focused investor, I would look for car rental models and housing start-ups over consumer financing and mortgage start-ups.

Hjalmar Winbladh (EQT Ventures)

I’m excited by shifts in areas that have remained essentially identical over the last few decades. Freight transportation is one of these. Applying automation to transport realizes the promise of self-driving autonomous vehicles and a fully sustainable transport system, which is a huge opportunity. Our investment in Einride fits this theme. Although the lifeblood of global supply chains, trucking is still riddled with operational flaws and inefficiencies.

We’re also seeing automation give bricks and mortar retailers a new lease of life, with autonomous checkouts enabling a seamless and efficient shopping experience and changing the entire retail purchasing process along the way. Our investment in Standard Cognition is an example here. Customers no longer get stuck in frustrating queues — they simply ‘grab and go’ — and other in-store operations such as on-shelf availability are also transformed.

Lina Wenner (firstminute Capital)

At firstminute, we have been spending increasing amounts of time in the Nordics and continue to see strong entrepreneurs who are forced to ‘think global’ from the very beginning. Personally, I have a keen interest in the digital health sector, where the Nordic countries are a great learning ground with relatively fast adoption of technology compared to other markets.

Gaming is another sector where the likes of Supercell, King.com and Unity have helped to foster a vibrant community with some very promising startups emerging.

This month, we were also pleased to announce our co-investment with Benchmark into Robocorp, an open-source RPA startup based in Helsinki, and we’re excited to be announcing two more Nordic seed stage deals before year end.

Tommy Andersen (byFounders)

The recent discourse on the “passion economy” strengthens our belief that knowledge workers will become more enabled and empowered to shape their own (work) lives. Emerging platforms and services now provide to freelancers the security, benefits and strength in numbers that was previously reserved for corporate employees. An example is SafetyWing, building a global social safety net for digital nomads.

People live to become increasingly older, and technology now allows us unprecedented insights into health at individual and population-wide levels. We pay close attention, and have so far invested in Corti, which applies machine learning and AI to improve diagnostics, and Drugstars, which builds a consumer movement that secures improved information for both patients and pharma in a closed-loop system. Moreover, we’ve invested in Qurasense, which addresses the data gap on women’s health by collecting continuous sample streams of biomarkers in a non-invasive way, allowing for a new depth of insights.

Ari Helgason (Index Ventures)

I‘m impressed by the quality of SaaS companies in the Nordics that combine strong tech expertise with design and consumer sensitivity. The combination of product sense and tech gives rise to B2B products that end users love. These products tend to get a lot of organic adoption and build strong brands.

We’re also interested in businesses that are transforming large industries that haven’t yet been in large part transformed by technology. Healthcare is an example where the Nordics are leading the way, we’re interesting models and companies dedicated to making healthcare better and accessible to everyone.

Magda Lukaszewicz (Balderton)

While some investors tend to shy away from gaming, we’re spending more time on the sector. We were early investors in Big Fish Games, Natural Motion, Wooga and Mojiworks, and with so many success stories from the Nordics, we are convinced there is more to come. I’m in particular excited about new game creators that are targeting females. Females are roughly 50% of the mobile gamers, however, only few games are created by and for women. It’s a huge and fairly underserved audience not only terms of content but also quality.

A question that is constantly on my mind is how and what we will eat (or drink) in the future. Nordics is a region where technology meets Noma (repeatedly ranked the best restaurant in the world, but also the heart of the food community in Copenhagen). I’m excited about what the strong food culture combined with innovation will result in. I believe the interesting players will combine health and sustainability at reasonable cost. In the plant based space, Balderton backed Simple Feast last year.

Christian Jantzen (Futuristic.vc)

I’ve recently invested in a few blue-collar tech companies. With most tech in the world being built for white-collar workers, it seems like there is still a lot of blank space to innovate in this area. The Nordics are also very hot on climate-tech currently, with a lot of interesting teams trying to literally solve the biggest problem in the world. Other than that, I think we will continue to see amazing companies emerge from here in the big verticals like FinTech, Enterprise SaaS, HealthTech, and gaming.