March 4, 2021
We at Promentum have been investing in tech startups for the past several years and have had the distinct pleasure of working with many passionate and extraordinary founders. We are now preparing to raise our second fund to further our engagement in the Nordic startup ecosystem, where we can contribute with both investment, knowledge, network and sparring. While 2020 was a challenging year for many, and in many ways, Promentum also had the privilege of growing the portfolio, even managing to exit 3 companies during the year: - AI company Grazper was sold to industry titan Yokogawa - Sales enablement platform Napp Sales Enablement was sold to one of the fastest-growing danish startups Templafy - Employee engagement platform Actimo - a Kahoot! company was sold to the impressive Norwegian startup success Kahoot! Our first fund closed at around EUR 40m, so we are eyeing a target which is 2x – 3x times higher. One of the opportunities and caveats we see in the Nordic ecosystem is that excellent tech startups quickly have to look for opportunities abroad as they start to require higher access to funding. One of the goals of the larger fund is to be able to further support these founder journeys within the Nordics before having to look abroad. In this endeavour, our approach will also be even more network-driven than in the first fund. We have found that our relationship with the founders come from mutual trust and dialogue both inside the boardroom but especially also outside, where we talk with our portfolio teams on a weekly or even daily basis. We also believe that Founders always can benefit from even broader perspectives and networks, and we will in our second fund seek to collaborate and co-invest with other venture funds like Seed Capital or ByFounders to provide them with just that. Kapital Watch and IT Watch wrote some more about our journey. The most exciting is yet to come. Stay tuned!