Why Icebreaker.vc invested in Coupleness

Icebreaker.vc
icebreakervc
Published in
4 min readJun 9, 2021

We are delighted to introduce the latest addition of the Icebreaker family: Coupleness!

Coupleness founders Peter Viksten, Jenny Holmström & Ted Rosén

It’s not news that nearly 50% of all marriages end up in divorce. Moreover, the majority of arguments in a relationship occur due to a lack of communication or communication breakdowns. There exists a huge variety of technology and apps we use to optimize different aspects of our lives, such as exercise, mental wellbeing, sleep etc, yet there are only few proactive ways to use technology to support healthy relationships.

Stockholm-based Coupleness is on a journey to make it easy and fun for couples to deepen their relationship, communicate and get closer to each other in their everyday lives. The company was founded in 2019, when Jenny Holmström and Ted Rosén were both faced with the same reality; how hard it is to juggle kids, family, friends and a relationship in everyday life. Holmström and Rosén started to dig deeper into what makes a great relationship and the founding team was strengthened when Peter Viksten joined the company in 2020.

The founding team consists of three high calibre individuals with experience across media, consumer products and high growth startups. CEO Jenny Holström has extensive experience working on social issues having spent significant time in the NGO space and most recently organising a prominent Swedish Campaign aimed at reducing children's’ exposure to pornography — during which she was working heavily on branding marketing and communications. Ted Rosén has substantial experience in the startup world having worked as the Head of Customer Success at Wrapp (raised $37m), and the Head of Sales and Marketing at Beambox. Peter Viksten has spent his career focused on building consumer facing apps most recently working at Lifesum, a consumer facing digital health startup (raised $22m) as the CPO. Viksten also has extensive experience from advertising agencies such as Wieden & Kennedy where he supported global consumer brands e.g. Nike.

The core idea behind Coupleness is to help couples make time for communication that often gets lost in the speed of modern life — this is presently done through daily micro journaling.

“With life moving at a pretty fast pace with kids, a house, a career and a relationship, I found myself deprioritizing my relationship. I assumed it would just work, without putting any extra energy into it. However, it eventually became clear that that was not the case. When I met Ted Rosén, who later became my co-founder, we realized we shared the same challenge: how hard it can be to nurture and maintain a healthy relationship when you’re juggling everyday life. So we set out on a journey to make things better,” explains CEO and Co-Founder Jenny Holmström.

“And we’re not alone; there are tons of couples out there with the same struggle, and we know we need to be more proactive to maintain our relationship’s well-being. People use all kinds of apps to stay healthy, so let’s fill the gap among wellness apps and help couples with their relationships. This is what Coupleness is all about: Active Love. Staying active in your relationship, just like you are with your own individual mental and physical well-being,” she continues.

Coupleness’ $1.1M seed round is led by us at Icebreaker.vc with participation from Angel Investors Joachim Hedenius (co-founder of Kry) and Marcus Lewold (COO of Epidemic Sound). The newly added funds will be used to help promote the product and accelerate growth.

“We’re super excited to have Icebreaker on board. We were looking for a hands-on investor with a positive attitude and values aligned with ours, who also knows their stuff when it comes to consumer apps. We found everything we hoped for with Icebreaker and Leo Giertz,” Holmström says.

The key reasons behind Icebreaker investing in Coupleness are the great experienced team in the consumer app space, real passion for the problem they are solving with deep ambitions to make the product better and better and finally the amazing early results from couples using the app.

“As a recent father of one who’s juggling both having a demanding career and being an engaged parent I ran into the same trap as both Jenny and Ted did. It’s quite easy to neglect your relationship and just focus on the mundane logistics of life. When we met the team behind Coupleness everything just clicked. Really looking forward to working with them and hopefully play a part in improving the relationships of couples around the globe,” concludes Icebreaker’s General Partner Leo Giertz.

Warm welcome to the Icebreaker family, Jenny, Ted, Peter and team Coupleness!

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