Luminar Ventures Announces Final Close of its Second Fund at 715 MSEK, Launches a Prominent Angel Program, and Reveals Latest Investments
We are excited to continue to partner up with the most talented and ambitious entrepreneurs in the Nordics. The final close of our second fund, underlining the robust investor trust in that we are building a leading seed power engine here in the Nordics. Our first fund has had some great first few years through companies like Mindler, Insurely, Normative, Greenely, Mynt, and Carla to name a few, and it is really great to see that our founders from the first fund have started to refer entrepreneurs to us in this second one. We note that a strong signal that our lean in the way of supporting founders resonates well with the founder community. We will continue to have a quite broad SW focus, with the core thesis to invest in the strongest and most ambitious teams from the Nordics. Though with an extra eye for the next big thing with areas such as AI, sustainability, and fintech.
As a part of this final close we are also announcing our new angel program, with 26 prominent angels and operating mavens from giants like Truecaller, Spotify, Epidemic Sound, and TINK. These angels, all investors in Luminar’s second fund, will collaboratively seek new investment opportunities and mentor founders. Esteemed angels include Johan Mohlin, Umut Alp, Ted Nelson, Jenny Sinclair, Karin Hallin, Björn Melinder, and Daniel Wisenhoff.
Our journey, since our initial close of this second fund in 2022, has been super exciting. We’ve aligned with eight rock star founding teams across the Nordics. As we are previously founders and angels ourselves, we truly appreciate the value that our angel program can add to our founders and to Luminar, and it helps to shape a comprehensive ecosystem ready to nurture the next generation of Unicorns.”
Umut Alp, former CTO of Truecaller: “I’ve experienced firsthand the transformative journey of taking Truecaller from ground zero to hundreds of millions of users. Partnering with Luminar Ventures gives me an exhilarating opportunity to offer this wealth of experience to the next wave of innovators. As an angel investor in Luminar’s fund, I am poised to not only financially support, but also technically empower founders, enabling them to scale unprecedented heights in their endeavors.”
The heart and soul of Luminar lies in our own core team, Jacob Key, Magnus Bergman, Daniel Karsberg, Louise Hagen, Reid Jackson, Irene Ardenstedt and and Eira Tobrand. This ensemble, with backgrounds as tech entrepreneurs, angel investors and early-stage VCs across Europe, embodies our ethos. Drawing from the team’s rich experience and involvement in close to 100 transformative journeys since the turn of the millennium, we serve as a strong partner for Nordic seed-stage startups with global ambitions.
We see great opportunities to continue investing in the most ambitious and talented entrepreneurs despite an undoubtedly challenging macroeconomic environment, and amidst a myriad of global uncertainties. As many other investors are somewhat sitting at the sidelines, we will lean in and are planning to invest in another 20 founding teams in the coming 2–3 years.
Historically, adversity and constraint have been powerful catalysts for innovation. Economic downturns, societal challenges, and even pandemics have spurred moments of unparalleled creativity and drive. When the environment gets tougher, true visionaries don’t see impediments, but opportunities. We have seen some major technical breakthroughs lately, and there are some serious problems out there to solve including the climate crisis, so we are quite bullish on investing and will continue to invest at a high pace into and also doubling down on our support of the best Nordic seed teams going after these problems
Since the first close of the fund, we have expanded our portfolio by partnering with eight innovative startups: four in Sweden, including RUN, xNomad, Hypertype, and Yazen; two in Denmark, namely Vibrant and Muninn; Aviant in Norway; and recently marking a milestone, their inaugural Icelandic investment in Rocky Road.
Luminar Ventures is backed by, among other LPs, the European Investment Fund and Saminvest
