After Gelato, Dune Analytics becomes Norway’s fourth unicorn!

It’s time to update the list of Norwegian unicorns. New entrants since my last update are Gelato and Dune Analytics. Gelato crossed the line in August last year (’21) and Dune two weeks ago (February ‘22). Gelato was incorporated in 2007 and is thus pushing the strictest of unicorn definitions, but I have included them in my list below. What an achievement by founders Henrik Müller-Hansen, Pål Næss and team!

Dune was established in September 2018, and spent less than four years becoming a unicorn, the quickest so far in Norway. In fact, so fast that I did not include them in my list of potential next unicorns in my June ’21 update, 8 months ago. I had made a note of including them after Union Square Ventures led Dune’s $8 million A-round in September ’21 plus SoMe signals of very strong growth, but Fredrik Haga and Mats Olsen moved too fast! The $69 million B-round lead by Coatue comes not long after the A-round. Hats off to an amazing journey so far!

There are other impressive growth stories happening in Norway at the moment too. Most notable is Easee which delivers intelligent chargers for EVs. Just like Dune, Easee was started in 2018. So far the company has not received an official unicorn stamp, but with turnover of $160 million in 2021 and EBITDA around $55 million, a priced round would with all likelihood make Easee a unicorn. Just look at their listed peer Zaptec. Zaptec recorded 2021 revenues of $55 million with an EBITDA of $10 million. The current market cap is $420 million.

How about the other companies on my “Norway’s next unicorns” list? In addition to Easee, last time around they were Boost.ai, Neat, PortalOne, reMarkable, Sanity, Tibber, Superside and Whereby.

• Boost.ai is performing well with Nordic Capital as new lead investor. Boost.ai was just selected for Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms.
• Neat also seems to be steaming ahead, buoyed by the pandemic and with Zoom’s $30 million investment in September ’21 at a $640 million valuation. Neat really timed their October ’19 launch very well…
• PortalOne just announced a $60 million round led by Tiger Global. The valuation was not disclosed, but is rumored to be around $350 million. It will be really interesting to watch PortalOne over the coming quarters as the service is properly launched.
• reMarkable has not raised since Spark Capital led a round in 2019, probably because the company continues to be cash-flow positive (as in 2020). 2021 numbers are not out yet, but my guess is that reMarkable has kept growing very fast, although maybe not at the same rate as between 2019 and 2020 (3.3x increase in revenue).
• Sanity on the other hand, raised a $39 million Series B in June ’21 with ICONIQ Growth coming in as new lead investor. Valuation and metrics were not disclosed, but the team is growing fast and is now at around 80 employees.
• Tibber seems to continue its very strong growth. 2021 numbers have not been released, but they will most certainly have been positively impacted by consumers switching to Tibber due to the record high electricity prices in Northern Europe towards the end of ’21. Strawberry Equities sold its 10% stake to Schibsted in October ’21, valuing Tibber at around $400 million.
• Superside is steaming ahead, having just raised $30 million from Prosus, Lugard Road and Slack Fund. TechCrunch reported its valuation to be just over $400 million, and the team now consists of about 150 staffers and 350 creatives, 500 in total. Key Superside clients include Amazon, Shopify, Salesforce and Cisco.
• Finally, last year it was revealed that Whereby raised MUSD 12 in a round led by Point9 and a group of super-angels. Whereby has since launched a new “Whereby Embedded” B2B product geared towards embedding video communication in other sites/solutions. It sounds somewhat similar to one of the other P9 Norwegian portfolio companies, namely Confrere, where the CEO and founder is one of Whereby’s — or Appear.in’s — original founders, Svein Willassen. Small world… Apparently, growth has flattened somewhat since the crazy early covid-19 period, but the new offering seems to be doing well.

Are there other companies that should be added to the list? I believe Ardoq deserves a mention, ending 2021 with MUSD 12.7 in ARR. Ardoq delivers an enterprise architecture tool that helps customers understand how their applications, people, processes, and data interconnect. The company saw accelerated YoY ARR growth from 60% in 2020 to 80% in 2021. It is more normal that the growth rate of B2B SaaS companies comes down as the base of subscription revenue increases, so this is very impressive.

There are also a number of companies that should be mentioned, but that fall outside my list since it is hard to call them Norwegian:

• First up is Sky Mavis, the creator of Axie Infinity, an etherum based play-to-earn game. One of the five founders, COO Aleksander Leonard Larsen, is Norwegian. He is based in Oslo. However, most of the team is located in Vietnam and the company is Vietnamese as far as I know. Sky Mavis already has unicorn status after raising $152 million in October ’21 at a $3 billion valuation. The round was lead by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from a.o. Oslo-based Snö Ventures.
• Nansen AI is a blockchain analytics platform, i.e. operating in a related space to Dune Analytics. The company has seen a similarly spectacular growth and value increase. In December ’21, Accel and Tiger Global led its $75 million B-round, joining Andreessen Horowitz, Slack Fund and Norwegian fund Skyfall Ventures. Two of the three founders are Norwegian, CEO Alexander Svanevik and Chief Data Engineer Lars Bakke Krogvig (formerly at Unacast). The company is established in Singapore where Alexander is located, but operates distributed with hubs in Lisbon, Hong Kong and Singapore. Lars and a few team members are located in Oslo, so Nansen has a fairly strong Norwegian link.
• Vic.ai delivers an AI based solution to automate accounting. The three founders are Norwegian; Kristoffer Røil, Alexander Hagerup and Rune Løyning, but the company is established in the US and the core team is located in New York. Vic.ai therefore falls in the same category as Nansen and also companies like NurX and Medallia — it is a stretch to consider them Norwegian. Vic raised a $50 million B-round in September ’21 led by ICONIQ Growth with participation of earlier backers GGV Capital, Costnoa Ventures and Cowboy Ventures. Valuation was undisclosed, but reportedly some hundred million dollars. Revenue was forecast to triple in ’21 and again in ’22, but no absolute numbers disclosed other than Vic.ai having
  5 000 clients.

These three companies have had remarkable journeys so far, and Nansen and Vic will probably join Sky Mavis as unicorns at some point.

Lastly, I should mention Signicat again. The company is 16 years old, but is growing fast and is clearly tracking towards unicorn valuation. Revenue figures for 2021 are not out yet, but the ambition was ~$75 million, up from about $50 million in 2020. Impressive.

To conclude, some lists:

Norwegian unicorns:

1. Oda
2. Cognite
3. Gelato
4. Dune Analytics

Listed Norwegian tech start-ups with unicorn valuation (only including those less than 13 years old)

1. Kahoot!
2. Forgerock

I have removed the list of older Norwegian-started privately held tech companies with unicorn valuations as both Autostore and Sportradar went public since my last update. So did Forgerock from 2010, thus included above.

My bet: Especially the top list of Norwegian unicorns will continue to grow significantly over the next few years.

For full disclosure: Alliance Venture was an early investor in Oda, Sanity, Boost.ai and Superside. All four are active portfolio companies.