Luminar Ventures announces its second seed fund, and expansion into the Nordics
We are thrilled to announce our second fund of SEK 600 million (€60 million), anchored by our existing investors EIF, the European investment fund, Saminvest, Svenska Kyrkan, Ericsson’s pension fund and several family offices.
In the last few years Luminar has become one of most prolific pre-seed and seed investors in Sweden, and our first fund made the firm one of the most active investors in the Nordics. The market has definitely evolved quite a bit since then, but our team is still focusing on finding the most ambitious and talented founders who can convey global potential and demonstrable fast scalability. As the ecosystem matures we see many more serial entrepreneurs and founders that have hands-on experience from fast growing startups from this region, and also globally. We are now more eager than ever to accelerate our investing pace.
The first fund has been quite vertical agnostic and we invested across sectors ranging from sustainability tech (like Normative and Greenely), developer tools (CodeScene and Debricked), gaming platforms (Hiber and Trail), consumer subscriptions (Hack Your Closet and Petbuddy Group), fintech (Mynt and Open Payments), healthtech (Mindler and Vården), insurtech (Insurello and Insurely) to marketplaces (Carla) and many more.
We feel that our mission of being a hands-on value-adding early stage VC has resonated very well with the founder community. We often hear founders saying that they really appreciate that we are truly delivering on the promise of being there helping, supporting and grinding with them whenever they need it.
It all comes from our love for the earliest part of the venture journey. Our investment team has collectively founded more than 10 tech companies in the past, and have successfully invested in over 30 startups as angels, and now another 30 companies across fund I. We get up every morning hungry to solve new problems, discuss strategic crossroads, and open up our network of fellow investors and other partners to help our teams grow even faster.
We have had tremendous early success in the first fund, with really high conversion rates between funding rounds, and already a few break-out companies. With this new second fund, we are ready to expand our founder friendly and active seed mentality across the entire Nordic region. We see that the other Nordic ecosystems are catching up to the Swedish one, and see great opportunities to support Nordic founders with the lessons we learnt from being here in Sweden for over 20 years investing in and starting tech companies.
We see tremendous innovation happening across all sectors, and we will continue to be sector agnostic, investing in the best and most ambitious teams. Of course, we are extra excited about a few technical platforms that are starting to be ready for mass-market adoption such as blockchain, AR/VR, AI, and also 5G. The Nordic early stage ecosystem has become one of the strongest globally, with the number of tech Unicorns per capita outnumbering almost every other international hub, and where cohorts of founders are embracing these new platforms and starting the next frontier of disruptive startups. Feel free to reach out if you are one of them and want us to be part of your journey….. and by the way, we are looking for more people joining our team.
Best, Jacob, Magnus, Daniel, Louise, Reid and Irene
