The Nordic Web Ventures raises a second fund and picks up Atomico’s Niklas Zennström as a backer

The Nordic Web Ventures, the ‘pre-seed’ investment firm founded by Neil Murray in late 2017, has raised a second fund to continue backing very early-stage startups within the Nordic ecosystem.

The remit of the new “Fund II” is largely unchanged from the first fund, promising to write the first cheque of between $50,000 and $75,000 for the most promising founders in the region.

In total, the size of The Nordic Web Ventures’ second fund is $1.5 million, which should see it have enough capital to make another 20 or more investments across the next 18-24 months, making the firm one of the most active investors in the region. Existing portfolio startups from Fund I include Engaging Care, TPH, Uizard, Meeshkan, SafetyWing, Confrere.

In addition to an all-star investor line up of Fund I LPs who are returning for a second bite — such as Index’s Martin Mignot, Point Nine’s Christoph Janz, and Philipp Moehring and Andy Chung of AngelList — Fund II sees a number of new LPs join. Most notably, perhaps, Skype and Atomico founder Niklas Zennström has invested, in addition to Atomico partner Sophia Bendz, who was previously an exec at Spotify and is already a very active angel investor in the Nordics and beyond.

Revealing that The Nordic Web Ventures plans to raise a much larger fund in the future, Murray tells me the plan for Fund II is to “fundamentally change” the early-stage landscape in one of Europe’s most interesting regions. He says the fund is also a great example of how Europe’s investment landscape is changing, with individuals from major European venture capital firms invested, as well as receiving backing “from some of the Nordic’s most successful entrepreneurs”.

Cue a statement from Atomico’s Sophia Bendz: “Neil and I share the same passion for entrepreneurship and both care a lot about the early stage ecosystem… The Nordic Web Ventures can, through their LP networks and expertise, provide dealflow, hands-on support and advice for Nordic pre-seed and seed companies, something that is super helpful for the founders and that’s what it’s all about in the end, being valuable to the entrepreneurs in a meaningful and relevant way”.

To that end, I’m also told that having raised Fund II, The Nordic Web publication and The Nordic Web Ventures will merge into a single entity, with The
Nordic Web’s core focus moving forward “to support and strengthen the Nordic ecosystem through investment, analysis and community”.