With another year coming to a close we had some time to reflect on 2019, and so want to share select highlights and milestones with you. If you are one of our LP’s, co-investors, portfolio companies, growth program participants, or partners, we want to once again say a big THANK YOU for this past year.
Investments
As an early-stage venture capital investor, this year we invested around €6,5M consisting of;
- 30 follow-on investments totaling €4M into our Innovestor Growth Fund I portfolio companies
- as well as 8 new investments and 3 follow-on investments totaling €2,5M into our Innovestor Growth Fund II companies. You can view our new portfolio companies listed here.
On our direct co-investment side, where we open up our investment cases to fellow co-investors for syndication, we organized 11 funding rounds of which 9 were growth companies and 2 commercial properties.
In addition to our own investments, our fellow co-investors invested €9M together with us this year; €6M into our growth companies and €3M into our properties.
Overall our portfolio companies are doing well and over the year they cumulatively raised over €50M in equity from different sources.
In regard to made exists, a clear highlight was our exit from Bitbar, a leading provider of web & mobile testing technology, as the company was acquired by SmartBear.
Growth Programs
A major milestone for us this year was the acquisition of the formerly known Kasvun Roihu, our now team that builds and executes growth programs. This milestone brought a whole new concrete way for us to put words into actions.
We are striving to create the best home for our portfolio and other growth companies and truly providing value in the form of more than just an investment.
This year we executed:
- 5 Grow to Market programs: 1 x China, 2 x Sweden, 2 x USA – check out and register to our 2020 programs here.
- 18 Kasvu Open Kasvupolkua (growth tracks) with varying themes such as smart industry & city, future transportation, health and wellbeing organized across Finland – application to select 2020 tracks here.
- 19 Development programs for public service providers
- Other customized growth programs such as reverse pitch events, Kasvu Open’s Nordea Growth program etc.
We counted that over 1000 growth hungry companies applied to our different programs throughout this year, and around 450 growth companies received roughly 5000 hours of growth sparring from experts within their own fields. All of this of course wouldn’t have been possible without the support and collaboration of the circa 200 partners.
What’s next?
We have come a long way from where we started 5 years ago when we were simply a financial services company helping growth companies raise funding. It was then a big step up when we acquired the majority share in Seed Fund Vera in 2016 and created our venture capital investment arm.
Combining capital, know-how and networks has always been our vision, a vision we are working towards by becoming as we identify as, a modern VC. Watch this space next year! Exciting things to come.
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Wishing you Happy Holidays and a prosperous New Year!
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