Introducing our 10 First Portfolio Companies
Since our inception, we’ve invested in the brilliant founders behind 11 awesome companies. We're looking forward to meeting, following, and investing in many more from across the New Nordics in the years to come!
Cobalt
Along with the digitization of everything, cyber attacks are fast becoming the greatest threat to companies around the world. The development of risk mitigating solutions and services has been going on for the past decades, among them penetration testing, or pen testing for short — authorized and simulated attacks on a computer system to evaluate its security. Yet, traditional pen testing solutions are outdated.
Cobalt revolutionizes this industry with their on-demand Pentest as a Service (<PTaaS>) via an agile platform with expertise from a global network of highly skilled talent. According to Gartner, worldwide spending on information security is expected to top $113 billion by 2020 and with an amazing team in place led by Jacob Hansen, Christian Hansen, Esben Friis-Jensen and Jakob Storm, we believe Cobalt to be uniquely positioned to capture a large portion of this market.
Corti
Emergency diagnostics is a time-critical issue, and with the emergency dispatch centres receiving a high number of calls a day, dispatch operators are forced to make fast decisions, often based on limited information, support and training. Decision fatigue can have grave consequences, and in the case of sudden cardiac arrest, the chances of survival decrease by 10% every minute.
Corti’s medical augmentation platform tackles this issue with speech recognition and machine learning enabled diagnostics. By identifying patterns directly on the audio stream, Corti’s tech delivers >90% diagnostic accuracy when detecting a cardiac arrest live. Its applicability is expected to go beyond emergency dispatchers to the offices of all medical professionals, virtually augmenting and enhancing their existing skill set.
Finally, Andreas Cleve and Lars Maaløe and the team behind Corti — serial entrepreneurs and PhD’s — are well equipped to drive what is likely to become a paradigm shift for the healthcare sector.
Drugstars
DrugStars is part of a trend moving towards consumer friendly HealthTech apps that allow for better tracking and monitoring of a consumer’s health. HealthTech is a large market with no strong incumbent in the medication tracking space, which enables DrugStars to establish a strong foothold as a leading tracking app.
DrugStars are on a mission to improve the lives of users of medicine and establish a dialogue between patients and the pharmaceutical industry. Until now, there has been no united global voice of patients on pharmaceuticals. As the first platform allowing patients to report on their experience with their medication, DrugStars is changing this, effectively becoming the TrustPilot for medicine and pharmaceuticals.
We’re excited to be backing Claus Møldrup and his skilled team on the journey to solve this critical issue.
Omnio
Although the ”Internet of things” (IoT) has been part of the tech language for a long time, there still hasn’t been a consolidation of communication standards for industrial IoT devices. Connecting such devices is a slow and costly process due to issues with understanding and interpreting the data they produce.
By using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning, Omnio delivers the ”Google Translate” for industrial device communication. Providing Plug & Play interoperability between devices, it reduces the on-boarding time for new devices.
The IoT market is already large and expected to grow to $1.7T by 2019, however, access to existing data streams is still very limited. With an estimated additional 1 billion industrial devices expected to have been connected and on-boarded in 2017, access to these data streams remains a major challenge. Through a highly scalable tech and platform, Mikkel Sørensen and Mikkel Thøgersen are building Omnio to enable device owners to unlock significant cost savings through optimized operations and maintenance.
Peergrade
The best way of learning is by teaching others. Peergrade pays homage to this tried and true statement, with their platform for students to give feedback to each other as peers. All the while, EdTech spending in higher education is expected to reach $75bn in 2020 at an annual growth rate of 17%. Peer learning is the future of education and David Kofoed Wind and Malthe Jørgensen are building Peergrade (soon to be Eduflow) to be at the centre of that.
Built on academic research, Peergrade is not just a tool saving teachers’ time and providing them with insights into their students’ performance. It is moreover found to improve the learning experience by up to 30%, by allowing the students to receive more and better feedback on their assignments. Additionally, learning is enhanced by reading and giving feedback to others’ assignments, making it increasingly easy to self-assess and improve the quality of their own assignments.
Qurasense
Traditional blood testing is still the reliable way of obtaining insights into patients’ health. However, its invasive and time-consuming nature coupled with high costs means the collection is infrequent and usually done in a reactive manner. Not only limiting the validity of the tests and the impact of potential cures, the inherent qualities of traditional blood tests mean they are not fit to serve the increasing demand for preventative healthcare.
Qurasense has found a solution that makes use of an often neglected data source, namely bodily fluids other than blood. Through a unique collection strip embedded into a menstrual pad — the Q-pad — Qurasense can capture a wide variety of blood types and biomarkers to deliver a transformative level of insight into women’s health. Once the menstrual pad has been used, the collection strip is posted to a lab and results are made available through a mobile app, empowering women to track their health on a regular basis, unlocking a stream of data that was previously inaccessible. The Q-pad is being clinically tested in collaboration with Stanford University, in the US and Zimbabwe.
The founders Sara Naseri and Søren Therkelsen have both spent years doing research related to Qurasense’s mission. Sara combines an outstanding track record as an entrepreneur with a strong academic background within medical sciences from Aarhus University, Harvard and Stanford. She previously founded a company that developed a UV-protecting technology to prevent skin cancer.
Søren is a serial entrepreneur with profound operational experience coupled with an academic background from Copenhagen IT University, Singularity and Stanford.
Uizard
Building graphic user interfaces such as websites or apps usually require working with a developer dedicated to turning your ideas into code. Uizard is building the world’s first AI technology that can instantly transform design mockups into code automatically, allowing people to create more powerful apps by shortening the time from an initial idea to a fully functional product.
In this way, Uizard essentially teaches computers to understand graphical user interfaces the same way humans do in order to propose a more efficient workflow for building apps and websites. Considering that on a daily basis, 12,000 new websites and >2,000 new mobile apps are created, there’s an immense market opportunity for Uizard’s solution. We participated in Uizard’s pre-seed round in 2018 and look forward to following and supporting Tony Beltramelli, Florian van Schreven, Henrik Haugbølle and Ioannis Sintos going forward.
SafetyWing
In this day and age, people are empowered to work from anywhere, an opportunity a vastly increasing workforce embrace and adopt. We call them digital nomads, and in 2018 they were estimated to make up 25 million people, doubling in size every year. However, until recently, their safety nets were quite limited. In terms of insurance, few options have been available as it’s been traditionally been offered by employers and/or contingent on permanent residency in the issuer country.
Having launched its product in 2018, SafetyWing offers a flexible global subscription-based insurance at a price point well below that of comparable offers. Founded by Sondre Rasch, Hans Kjellby, and Sarah Sandness — a strong team of seasoned Norwegian entrepreneurs — SafetyWing has been through Y Combinator and recently closed its seed round. We were happy to take the lead on this, following our pre-seed investment in 2018.
SimpleFeast
SimpleFeast is on a mission to accelerate the world’s move towards healthy, sustainable food by producing and distributing convenient, plant-based, high-quality meal boxes to consumers.
With its ready-prepped meal boxes designed to bridge the gap between meal kits and takeaway, SimpleFeast is tapping into the global, climate-conscious movement and a multi-billion dollar market. People globally are slowly but surely starting to transition from meat to alternative sources of protein, and in contrast to most other innovation in the food industry, such as flavour innovation, the transition to plant-based protein is likely to be disruptive.
The strong team behind SimpleFeast, including Endomondo co-founder Jakob Jønck, has a stellar track record, mitigating some of the risk you inevitably face when provoking big business. This is something SimpleFeast is certainly not afraid to do.
Spiio
Companies worldwide are considering their environmental footprint. But thinking green isn’t limited to business practices, it’s increasingly becoming living breathing parts of the working environment in the form of plants and green walls. However, office improvements like these are maintenance intensive and require constant monitoring.
Spiio has developed a wireless sensor solution, a digital gardener, registering the growth conditions for plants, such as water- and fertilizer levels, soil moisture and light conditions. With the help of sensors, software and data analysis, Spiio can evaluate whether the plants are doing well, as well as giving the gardener the complete overview of the plants’ condition directly on their mobile phone.
Martin Dal and Chris Thorup are with Spiio targeting plant service businesses services plants in larger public or office buildings, addressing a billion dollar market. A market with great possibilities to use data and intelligent software to optimize workflows and reducing time wasted. Spiio has the potential to revolutionize this industry.
Tame
Event planners are said to have one of the most stressful jobs out there. With so many moving parts coupled with hard and oftentimes tight deadlines, this is no surprise. What is surprising, however, is the number of granular solutions tackling only small portions of the event management puzzle. This usually leads to tool oversubscription, with limited transferability but significant overlap. Excel seems to be the preferred tool overall, which says a great deal about the lack of adequate tools available.
Tame is tackling this immense problem with its seamless, comprehensive event management platform. Geared to capture rich data sets, this platform opens up for a wealth of possibilities, of which building a marketplace for every element of the event planning process is just one. Coupled with effective machine learning, Jasenko Hadzic, Mickey Switzer and team are primed to revolutionize the way events are executed, from ideation through curating speakers to reporting.
