Swedish venture capital firm BackingMinds has raised more than €50 million ($56.1 million) in a first close of its third fund. Two high-profile gaming entrepreneurs have joined as new investors.
The Fund
The new fund will back 15 to 20 companies in areas including artificial intelligence, climate and “resilience,” founders Sara Wimmercranz and Susanne Najafi said in an interview.
New backers include Carl Manneh, co-founder of Mojang, who helped build Minecraft, and Sebastian Knutsson, co-founder of Candy Crush maker King. The European Investment Fund (EIF) committed €20 million. Among the largest private investors are Karl-Johan Persson, heir to Hennes & Mauritz, and Conni Jonsson, founder of EQT.
Investing Outside the Usual Networks
BackingMinds focuses on founders outside traditional VC networks, an approach shaped partly by Wimmercranz’s and Najafi’s own experiences raising money as entrepreneurs. According to the firm, about 43% of the founders it has backed are women, 43% have immigrant backgrounds and more than 70% founded their companies outside major startup hubs such as Stockholm and Copenhagen.
A Tough Fundraising Market
European venture firms continue to struggle with a lack of exits, which leaves investors with less money to recycle into new funds. Deal flow and investment activity are starting to pick up, but fundraising remains difficult, according to an October survey by the European Investment Fund.
“Those investors have been waiting to get distributions so that they can invest in new funds,” Najafi said. With few IPOs, “capital has been locked up.”
